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The pain of writing
During the film festival, I managed to blog fairly regularly in between the films and work, not suffering too much over my words, even though some film reviews would take me a decent amount of time to compose, even if they were only a few paragraphs. Over the Thanksgiving break, I took on another writing task, The Endowed Teaching Chair Portfolio. My school offers one or two of these a year for faculty. It's a three year award ($5,000 salary boost for the year and $2,500 to spend on professional development) with some good benefits. I've resisted applying over the years, feeling like others who had been teaching longer than I had deserved the award more. Then for several years my close friend Liz was applying, and I did not want to compete against her. She got the award last year, so my excuses ran out.
The portfolio has several components: a CV, two 500 word essays (a philosophy of teaching, and a statement of faculty excellence), and documentation. Here's where the pain of writing began. My CV had not been updated for at least 3-4 years. I spent many hours digging for information and updating the CV, including an overhaul of formatting, which only adds to the pain of writing since Microsoft Word complicates matters when playing with tables. Once the CV neared completion, I set forth on the teaching philosophy, figuring I had a brief start with that based on some statement I had on the departmental webpage. It turned out that statement was too narrow toward my writing philosophy, and thus, I had to figure out how to open the essay more. After lots of feedback from my editing team (Nan and Liz), I managed a good final draft to run by my comma guru (Paul). The entire process for that essay took approximately 6-8 hours, which seemed like an insurmountable eternity at the time. I did the same for the other essay.
Writing and revising these essays proved rather difficult in the moment. It's been awhile since I tackled writing that would somehow be judged. Perhaps my blogs are judged, but I am not overtly aware of that. In this case, I knew that my peers would initially be reading my material (two of them fellow colleagues in my department), and thus, I felt a sense of being judged by my writing. I also had forgotten how big a role ego plays in writing, and each time I got a page of revisions back from my editors, I first reacted defensively, unable to separate my ego from the page, feeling deflated about my essay. Once I remembered to put my ego aside (literally I needed to cast it away) and objectively look at their suggestions, I succeeded in attacking my draft, ultimately producing two essays that surpassed their initial drafts.
This whole process reminded me of the pain/struggles my students go through when faced with writing essays. Creating this portfolio, even though it took many hours of my break, was well worth it. I ended up with a portfolio that contained my best shot to submit before the deadline (2 hours to spare), and I had a remembered sense of how difficult the writing process can be.
