Staying Creative

Amidst the rigours and demands of full time teaching it can be difficult to maintain a balance between what you want to do and what you have to do. At the very beginning of this year I set myself one overarching target: to ensure that I still take the time to pursue my own interests and hobbies. I am glad to have, by and large, achieved this. 

Not only will setting this time aside contribute to a more balanced lifestyle than the alternative, but I would argue that it will likewise bring associated benefits to the classroom. A teacher who leads and enjoys a fulfilling life outside of the confines of the school walls must inevitably bring back to their teaching a renewed energy and enthusiasm. 

Though my own recreational pursuits focus predominantly on musical/dramatic and sporting endeavours, I have also this year completed the latest year of my MA Ed qualification. As part of this year's module I was required to submit a portfolio of my own creative writing. Having taken a module in playwriting as part of my first degree, I was looking forward to this challenge, though not a little anxious at the demands it would invariably place on my ever-decreasing time. 

I need not have worried. Yes - I was still writing right up until the deadline but, in the main, the process was enjoyable, therapeutic, and, most excitingly, illuminating in terms of the process of actually being a writer. Never again would I underestimate the challenges faced by my students required to produce a piece of writing in artificially imposed conditions. They are not afforded the luxury of thinking time in the shower or during a run, or of critical self-reflection and improvement in a twenty minute period. Nor are they often given the opportunity to write whatever they like! An imposed structure, or suggestions for content, can be useful as scaffolding, or indeed be a requirement for certain types of technical writing, yet if this is the only writing that students are faced with, surely their motivation will suffer. My module came with a completely open brief. I could be playful, experimental and daring, safe in the knowledge that I was permitted to submit, alongside three completed pieces, fragments, beginnings and extracts. 

The focus was on process rather than product.

A whole host of implications for my teaching of writing have arisen as a result of this work and I have been reminded of a poem I wrote during my PGCE year (reproduced below). This poem simply needed to use original words formed by blending two existing ones - the writing followed a brief consideration of Blake's language in The Tyger. Other than this one simple rule I was free to use my imagination (more difficult for some than others admittedly) and be playful with my own invented language.

If my original premise was to maintain an effective lifestyle balance in order to bring benefits into the classroom, should I not also be attempting to facilitate the conditions for playfulness and safe experimentation in my teaching in which my students, and their writing, might flourish? 

Redoubled 

Toxious, angstsome, they caravalled

Flaisily through stromes of raylings.

So crimpsy proved the shadouettes

For those who stross from dayfings.

They go and still no traven found

'Neath night's new furléd mattressack.

Onwards press they, for mitric fray

Ensoaks their heartsome hack.

Never forget what sneeps revind

For loss of haith spells astion - 

And once gone doss there's no recourse...

Save superinduceration!

With novely garstered stroughts of strense

A goracious effempt instorts.

No more the mits of tripal froom

Will boldness insubort.

They change their course and back new brage,

The froathal foe to troynal.

There's one last chance: the final dance,

In this life's epsome entral.