I spent the last two days in mandatory district sponsored professional development workshops. The 32nd Annual Bilingual Multicultural Education Equity Conference was in town and teachers from all over the state showed up. Typical of most large conferences I’ve been to, I had options throughout the day to attend various sectionals. I was able to find interesting sessions to attend, which isn’t always the case at these local events.

One of today’s highlights was a session called Freewriting offered by a local poet/teacher who writes literary nonfiction, and is published here and elsewhere. After talking about the need to teach process (Planning, Translating, Reviewing) as well as product (grammar), and sharing some print resources with us, we did some freewriting ourselves. Freewriting is simply a warmup exercise, an exploratory private form that can help writers when they need to get started. The normal constraints about staying on topic don’t apply.

The “rules” for freewriting were taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind (1990):

  1. Keep your hand moving.
  2. Lose control.
  3. Be specific
  4. Don’t think.
  5. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar.
  6. Feel free to write the worst junk in the world.
  7. Go for the jugular.

I think I knew about most of these guidelines already. But it didn’t hurt to hear them again. I must have been feeling energized because before we were even given the writing prompt, I was getting revved.

This is what I put in the notebook while I was listening to instructions for the freewrite:

Thinking about personal trajectories - about becoming - I’m thinking about who we are and how we know who to become. I suppose I’m thinking about that because this is a professional development day and I’m here as a “Teacher in Development” like a foreign country, or an urban renewal project.

I’m being cultivated to a purpose. Whose purpose? To become what?