Writing While Teaching: A Balancing Act Worth the Time
What it means to write and teach at the same time—and how sharing both crafts publicly deepens the work
A couple of weeks ago, I visited with teachers attending a Summer Writing Institute sponsored by the Ohio Writing Project (OWP). OWP is a local site of the National Writing Project at Miami University, a network of K-12 teachers, university faculty, researchers, and writers working to advance writing and the teaching of writing.
Beth Rimer, the executive director of OWP, asked me to Zoom with teachers who had conducted a year-long teacher action research project and were graduating with their Master of Arts in Teaching. These teachers would be leaving the OWP program, but Beth didn’t want the program to leave them. Beth wrote to me in an email: “I want them to think about continuing to write as a teacher and making their practice public.”
What a great conversation to have.
What does it mean to write and to teach at the same time, and to also share your writing and teaching practice with the world?
We met via Zoom and discussed ways full-time teachers can honor the writer within, who sometimes is relegated to the back burner when school resumes and life gets hectic. One of the most essential gifts a writing teacher can give herself is time to write. But with our 36-hour obligations, how do we find it? Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way suggests writing three pages every morning as soon as you get out of bed. But if you have children to wrangle and buses to catch, this is impossible. I’ve always wanted to be one of those writers who could rise at 4 am and write for two hours before going to work. I did this for one semester, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I’m just not built for that schedule.
Here are some ways that have worked for me:
Schedule a writing date with yourself.
Maya Angelou famously reserved a hotel room for her writing dates. Still, for you it might be one Saturday each month where you clear your calendar, let the kids be managed by someone else, and you go somewhere - a park, a library, a cabin in the woods - for some sustained writing time. Write about whatever you want - poetry, your pedagogy, a memoir that’s been dying inside of you to be written- and call it self-care and professional development.
Write in the edges of the day.
Before she obtained commercial success, Toni Morrison was raising children plus working long hours as a fiction editor for Random House. She famously said she wrote at “the edges of the day” (Greenfield-Sanders, 2019). Teachers can do what most writers whose day jobs consume their time have done throughout history: write in the edges, the cracks and crannies of their day. Twenty minutes before the students enter your room and twenty minutes at the end of the day will sustain you. The kind of writing I’m suggesting here may not be significant, publishable, outside writing; it’s most likely inside writing, personal and messy. However, this inside practice makes it possible to take one’s ideas and teaching practice outside. This kind of writing generates ideas and snippets, which can be developed into finished, publishable pieces if desired.
Make yourself accountable to someone close to you.
Starting in March, I have gotten out of bed at 6:30 am and hopped on a Zoom call from 7-8 am with a writing friend of mine (also a teacher) who lives in Oklahoma. We greet each other briefly, pledge allegiance to the muse, mute our audio, and start writing. There was something so profoundly grounding and so orderly about my days when I kept this commitment. Miraculously, we have managed to keep this meeting going for months. Knowing she would be waiting for me to write made it easier for me to commit to my work. This commitment is no different from finding an accountability buddy for the gym, meditation, or any other self-improvement practice you want to develop.
Make yourself accountable to someone you’ve never met.
Send out that query letter. Apply to present at conferences. Finish that book proposal, make twelve copies, and send it out to twelve publishing houses you feel might get what you’re selling. Contact an editor directly and send them your manuscript. Reach out to an agent if you’re writing fiction. See what putting yourself out there to someone you’ve never met does for your ability to put your nose to the grindstone.
Focus on the process, rather than the product.
I’m very much a product-oriented Enneagram 3 person. I like deadlines and finishing things, but this practice of writing while I’m simultaneously teaching full-time has helped me make peace with and enjoy the process. The constant tension of writing and teaching can feel exhausting. You’re never fully caught up in either. But that’s the point. Both practices resist perfection. Both require patience. And both invite you to be a person in process, rather than a finished product.
Writing while teaching has taught me to be less precious with my ideas and more circumspect with my time. It’s taught me to be okay with publishing Substacks that aren’t polished, because the conversation matters more than the performance.
And in the end, whether we’re sharing a lesson, an essay, or a quiet realization, we’re offering something of value to the world: an honest look at the reality of a classroom, the intersection of living and learning. The world needs the voice of teachers living at that intersection.
I used to do both and then I started getting published and then I started sharing those publications and over time there is quite a lot of my writing out there…. It was a thing of pride, indeed. It also helped make me a better teacher for my students. But then something happened. The impact of social media on the kids’ brains starting with remote learning (2020) hasn’t been the same as access to social media before. I have stopped sharing, and if publishing, I prefer anthologies and nothing online. In fact, I think about shutting my website each year. There is nothing out there in my writing nor my website that I can’t stand by. But, these students and sometimes their families, see educators (and others who may post any content online) less and less as human being. With Tik Tok challenges abound, it makes it very difficult. Perhaps a pseudonym? I don’t know. It’s a challenge that I didn’t experience before 2019.