On Thursday, we said goodbye to our sweet, adventurous golden retriever, Friday. She grew up with my kids, and it was a tough farewell. They say 13 is a good age for a dog, but no amount of time would really have been enough. She was the constant in our lives every time we walked in the door for 13 years and loved us all unconditionally, which is all you could really want from a dog. Our whole family was with her when she passed, and when I got home, I curled up under a blanket and couldn’t do much more than scroll my phone, feeling emotionally drained.
The next day, we woke up to a quieter and emptier house, our new normal. But I also woke up with an urge to write. I hadn’t felt like that in a while. I had been technically writing—things like the lists that tried to keep me organized and essays to model what I wanted students to write. But I hadn’t felt an urge to get my words out for some time.
I started by asking everyone in the family their best memories and listing them. Then I wrote some short stories. My pen kept going, and the more that came out on the page, the better I felt.
I wrote about the day we got her. I wrote about all the naughty things she had done. I wrote about the funny stories (which were often the ones when she was naughty). I wrote about the lessons she unknowingly taught us. I wrote about her irrational fears that endeared her to us. I wrote about her final days. I wrote about her very last day.
Then I sent it out into the world. I sent emails, made Instagram posts, and sent text messages. Things felt better.
All of this made me think about why we write, and that led me to think about teaching kids to write. It made me think about how easy it can be to get lost in the forest of teaching writing: to get lost in all the pieces of writing like grammar and punctuation and complex sentence structures and topic sentences and transitions and text evidence and spelling and dialogue punctuation and strong word choice and the list goes on and on.
And suddenly I realized I wasn’t spending nearly enough time teaching how important it is to write about the things you care about most: the things that live in your heart; the things that keep you up at night; the things that grow the best writing. I always started out teaching about that, but then came the pressure to make sure kids knew how to set up their text evidence in a literary essay or write a strong hook for their argument paper, and somehow the things that were really living in their hearts could get lost.
So on Monday I went into school and told my kids most of what I’ve written above and asked them if I could share something I wrote. Then I read them my tribute to the best dog in the world. I told them why I was proud of this writing, and it didn’t have to do with my strong word choices or my use of transitional phrases or my varied sentence structure. It was because I wrote about something I cared about, something that came from my heart.
I told them about my process: how I jotted lists first; how I handwrote pages of stories; how I glanced at the handwritten pages while I typed, writing the same general ideas but in a new way; how I would draft in my head and then grab a pen to jot an idea, so I could hold on to it until I got back to my doc; how I would read and reread to see how it sounded. And how when I thought it was really done, it really wasn’t, and I kept making changes.
I know writing can’t be like that all the time, but I know it can be like that some of the time, and I need to make sure students know this too. That while they’re in school or maybe at work someday, they may have to write well about things they don’t really care about. They may have to write to show their knowledge on a topic or to answer a question. But that isn’t all that writing can be. That can’t be the only thing they let writing be.
It can be the thing that lifts you up and pushes you over the hard parts of the hills in front of you; it can be the way you share the best parts of yourself and the things you love with the world; it can be the thing that helps you understand what’s most important to you in the world.