If writing a book about teaching is something you've thought about more than ten times, then let's start with: Yes — I think you should take the compulsion seriously. It's not a thing that can be done on a whim, but where there's a settled sense of calling to treat a topic in education with a book-length work (roughly 40,000-65,000 words) before your career is done, I encourage you to consider that the calling might be something to think about in earnest.
I'll give three examples of folks who did so and ended up better for it, and after that I'll share some of the realities of book writing I've found important considerations.
One example is Jim Burke. For him, teaching and writing are synergistic forces in a vibrant, 30+ year classroom career. The teaching creates the questions, the writing explores the questions, the teaching refines the exploration, the writing refines the teaching. When the teaching feels impossible, the writing helps you through. When the writing feels stuck, the teaching provides the way out. This is the key to understanding Jim’s prolific output.
Another is a teacher we'll call Edward. He was fed up with the toxicity of his teaching situation and was desiring another career. He decided that he'd spend his last year in the classroom writing a book of poems about his experiences. The book would be titled Why I Quit Teaching. But as the pile of poems grew, so did his engagement and sense of purpose. He found himself more capable of weathering the storms that in prior years had unmoored him.
Next let’s consider Sheri Steelman, who capstoned a decorated career in a West Michigan classroom with a book on teaching Shakespeare. In her retirement, she helps a select number of schools and teachers to improve their craft. But during her final years, this book added to the sense of purpose and clarity she had been honing for decades in her classroom.
All of these folks did it differently. They came to their calling in book writing through different journeys. Two of them have already published their work; one is still finishing his. But the thing to take away is that writing about teaching did something inside of them that not writing about teaching could not.
So like I said: if you feel compelled to write a book about teaching, then you really maybe should. Because it’s a kind of labor that can clearly help the laborer.
But with those things said, I'll say that there are no professional endeavors that have challenged my entire soul like book-writing has. I'd point to a few factors that make the work so challenging:
- Writing confronts you with your lack of clarity. It's one thing to have amazing conversations about pedagogy with your hallway colleagues or folks at a conference. Conversations like these are critical to creating great books, but they aren't enough to produce good work. When I've built out the table of contents for the books I've written, I get this giddy sense of accomplishment, like the work is nearly done. But it's in the chapter writing where you discover your current inability to expand upon ideas that made so much sense when they were just bullet points. This is a very frustrating feeling, and I think it's here where many would-be authors turn back. I never feel dumber than when I'm in the midst of writing about something that seemed clear when I was thinking or talking about it yesterday but now today is marred by the mud of my stubborn confusion.
- Writing about teaching will make you feel like an imposter. When you're in the book-writing process, your heart becomes especially sensitive to the ways in which your teaching practice is lacking, especially in comparison to others. In other words, it is like jumping in to waters infested with Imposter Syndrome Sharks, and that book you're writing acts like a bloody fish carcass attached to your wetsuit. Some authors (like Edward above, or like Kelly Treleaven in her book Love, Teach) have styles or approaches that make their own sensed difficulties a source of treasure to the reader and the writer). We laugh and cry with them because they get our struggle. I don't know if these approaches help them overcome the imposter syndrome, but I know that for me, a big help is just knowing that it's a normal feeling and that all great teacher-authors struggle with it, especially on their first books.
- Writing about teaching doesn't make you better than anyone else. Last night at our high school's graduation ceremony, my colleague Scott Modisher gave a commencement address in which he argued every person has a gift for the world. For some of us, it's writing. For most others, it's something else. Just because I'm an oddball who sometimes finds himself compelled to write books doesn't mean I'm of any greater value than the fearfully and wonderfully wrought colleague down the hall. It instead just means that I've chosen to take my gift and put it to what use I can.
- Writing about teaching can feel like whispering toward a hurricane, but nonetheless the whisper matters. In an Internet landscape like ours, articles and blogs and videos on education
I'll close with a quotation that gave me a knowing chuckle. This is George Orwell's summary of the book-writing experience. He wrote,
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.*
I get what he means. The process is grueling. And, that's part of why it's so helpful to the grueler. 🙂
Best,
DSJR
*Thank you to David Brooks for reminding me of this line on p. 88 of The Second Mountain.
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