If you've been around me much, you know I have talked for awhile about writing a memoir about my first five years of teaching. The statistic is that about half of new teachers quit within the first five years. So I figured it might be interesting to write about my first five years. I made it through but not without a layoff and other issues along the way. (Only those closest to me know the worst of it!) I'm happy that I am in my 6th year and still enjoy it, although if I do stop, it will be to stay home when I have kids.
About writing the book: I started by going through my old journals, and anything I wrote about school, I would type that up. Therefore, the memoir is diary-style, with dates and entries on each date. Then I went through and added in notes from my lesson plan book about certain lessons or techniques, so there was a balance of emotional (in the journal) and actual teaching (from the lesson plans). Then there's the students. The pack rat that I am, I saved pretty much every note I ever confiscated, and typed them up to put in the book. Hehe... I did warn the students about this! (Of course all names will have to be changed). Beyond that, I looked through pictures, memorabilia, emails I'd saved, and my personal calendar to add other events. I'm still not done though, even with 55,000 words, which is over 200 pages. But the document is so big to scroll through, I am going to get it printed so that I can read through and add things that I forgot about. For example, I just finished with the 5th year of high school, but realized I didn't have anything about the EL tutoring where I worked with some very special students, or our C2G program. So I need to put that in.
One of the hardest things for me will be changing the names. Names of students are so personal. How do I replace that with another name? But of course I will have to. I also need some non-teacher people to read it to see if it makes sense to them, because I want to appeal to a wide audience.
Speaking of audience, my best friend asked my what my target audience was, and I'm not sure. Certainly other teachers might enjoy it. But I hope that it is broader than that. Maybe I want to show what public schools are really like- the very positive and also some of the negative. So what is that audience? Parents? Policymakers? I don't know. Maybe it's just anyone who likes a true story about someone who persevered. I hope that is the ultimate message.
Of course, it won't even be ready to send to a publisher to try to get them to publish it for at least a few months. But I am hoping that I can be happy with a draft before summer. We'll just see what God works out!
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