Dear colleague,
Last year, my student Abby V shared something that I found hilarious: in her bedroom, she has photos of people she looks up to hanging near her door. Her rule for herself is that she is not allowed to leave her room unless she promises not to disappoint them. The list of people was fairly eclectic: Elle Woods (from Legally Blonde), Malala Yousafzai, Princess Diana, Ted Lasso, and her grandma. And the matter-of-fact manner with which she shared this — like, “Of course I have a wall of photos of the people and characters I am not allowed to disappoint. Who doesn't?” — just got me rolling with laughter.
When I shared this with my friend Jim, he said, “Diane McClain, one of my mentor teachers from Burlingame, just an amazing woman in her 70s now, said many times that we all need at least one person in our lives that we cannot stand the idea of disappointing. And in his greater, much earlier days, Tiger Woods said he always imagined himself walking down the fairway every time with Arnold Palmer on one side and Jack Nicklaus on the other. It's a useful and demanding rubric of sorts.”
And when I shared it with my daughter Laura (who is now in ninth grade and is on one of my rosters this year), she and I had a fun time brainstorming all the folks we would put on our wall.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Abby's wall wasn't just a funny thought — this spunky teenager walking out of her room, vowing not to disappoint the protagonist of Legally Blonde — but was in fact profound. And so a few weeks later, with Abby's permission, I shared the wall with my students and had them write about who would be on their wall.
The responses were all over the place — some whimsical, some profound — and overall, it was probably my favorite writing warm-up prompt of the entire past school year.
I don't have a written writing prompt to share with you — I simply shared Abby's story and Jim's additions with my students and then got them writing — but I'm sure you could make a similar experience in your classroom at some point this fall.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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