Each year I write my students a letter of introduction that I read to them on the first day.  Their first homework is to write me a letter back.  This is my 11th letter, and one I’m proud of.  Enjoy.

August 23, 2017

Dear Students,

I’m getting comfortable with failure.  Failure is the wrong word, though.  Failure is so final, it denotes an ending with nothing beyond it.  Struggle is the word I prefer.  Struggle isn’t over; struggle can continue; struggle keeps trying.  So, I will say that I’m getting comfortable with struggle.  Except comfortable is also the wrong word.  Struggle is never comfortable or easy.  But I’m getting better at struggle, at not letting struggle equal failure.

I’m getting better at struggle by being a writer.  I’ve written two novels (which add up to 130,000 words, not counting all the words I cut or rewrote) and 5, 6, or 7 picture books—fewer words, but more agony over each one.  And I’ve submitted my writing to strangers 400 times.  I copy the email address and I click send, hoping I didn’t miss a typo, didn’t misspell the recipient’s name or (gag!) my own.

The letter a writer sends out with her sample pages is called a query.  Query, which shares a root with inquire and question.  I am asking a question: do you like this?  Do you want to help me make this into paper and ink that will be dog-eared and underlined, carried in backpacks, passed from hand to hand?

What I’m really asking is, “Is this any good?”

But I write cool, collected query letters.

“I think you might like this…”

“I’ve attached the first ten pages…”

“I’d be happy to send the full manuscript…”

I try not to let my longing show through in these emails, like love letters stripped of their love.  I don’t tell them that I’ve sent them a piece of my soul, hours and hours and hours spent clicking away at my desk in a closet, during babies’ naps or after bedtime kisses.

I sign my letters “Sincerely,” but “Lovingly” is a better fit.  I’m sending the child of my brain in 0s and 1s across the air, flashes of light in fiber optic cables; sending a signal that I hope will materialize in the mind of the reader, and tell a story they didn’t know they wanted to hear.

I told a friend about waiting months for a response to arrive.  She said, “It’s teaching you to hold things lightly.”  Perhaps that’s it.  In front of the blank page I don’t hold back, I jump Geronimo off of outline bridges into streams of Times New Roman.  But then I release my words into the world accepting that maybe no one will read them, or the ones that do won’t like them.

But I keep thinking of that lottery slogan, “You can’t win if you don’t play,” and playing in this case means making something out of nothing and then accepting that that something might truly be nothing, nothing I can control, so something only for me.  Maybe?

I wonder if you, dear students, add up all the quizzes and the tests and the papers, the rewrites and the early help sessions, the red pen slashes, the “come see me’s” and the “this needs more work.”  Have you reached 400?  Double that?  We ask you each day to put some part of you on the page or the board and we tell you what didn’t work and maybe what did.  So who am I to be sad or discouraged?  Perhaps I’ve just gotten too far away from being a student, I’ve forgotten how to struggle and continue, as you do each day.

Because there’s no way from here to there without going through this.  No shortcuts.  You have to cut through the red pen and the paper with the machete of your mind.  Hack a path, all on your own.

But you, you’ve got me.  I’m just ahead of you, I’ve made it through this particular jungle and I’ve sketched a map that will help me to help you.  Sometimes maybe you can see me and sometimes you can’t, and you’ll wonder what I know anyway.  Maybe you’d be better just to set down and quit struggling.  You’ve had to double back, you’ve hit dead-ends, maybe none of this is worth it.

But, I know.  I know that you will make it. I know this even when you doubt.  I believe when you won’t.  If you will just keep swinging the blade, inquiring of the universe, asking the question again and again.

What I want is for you to be willing to struggle.  Don’t ask me to lie to you and just tell you that you’ve arrived, that you don’t need to go any further.  Don’t ask me to tell you that the struggle is over.  Maybe you hope you’re different, that you got lucky and landed right near the end and soon you’ll get to rest.

“Oh baby,” (I croon in the voice of Billie Holiday) “there is no rest.”  But you’re moving forward, I promise.  Sometimes it’s slow, and sometimes it’s fast.  Sometimes you’re even backtracking.  But sometimes you gotta go back to move forward and I won’t quit you if you don’t quit yourself.

Who am I anyway?  I’m Mrs. Griswold.  I’ll be your struggle guru teacher this year and this is my lucky 7^th year at Harpeth Hall—that must be good omen.  I have three kids whose pictures dot my bulletin board.  I have an old dog who’s afraid of thunder, 6 chickens, and I keep bees in my backyard.  I’m a slow runner, but I like to do it.  I’m a theater major who now performs for audiences of 16 and gets to analyze plays every year.

Before I lived in Nashville, I lived in New York City.  Before that, London and Cleveland.  Back even further I lived in Caracas, Venezuela from 7^th grade to 12^th, and Mexico City for 5^th and 6^th grade.  I speak Spanish fluently and enough Portuguese to have conversations in the present tense.  Until age 10 I lived in Cincinnati.  So where am I from?  The answer is complicated but I’m happy to call Nashville home now.

Before we begin, would you write me a letter?  Tell me about who you are.  What are you struggling with?  How does struggle feel to you?  Where are you going?  How can I help you?  What do you love?

Sincerely (Lovingly),

Meg Griswold

This year marks my tenth year of writing a letter of introduction to my students at the start of the year.  Here is what I wrote this year.  Enjoy! (To read last year’s letter, click here.)

August 17, 2016

Dear Students,

Welcome to a new school year!  My name is Mrs. Griswold and I will be your English teacher.  Every year, I write my students a letter of introduction so that you can get to know me, and then I ask you to write a letter back to me so that I can learn a little bit about you.

It’s a contemplative and reflective experience to sit down and check in and see how I’ve evolved from the year before.  For you, each new school year brings new teachers and classes and sometimes a new school.  You’re off on a new journey, and honestly, every year I also feel as though I too am starting a new epic adventure.  I’d like to believe that with bravery and clear eyes, life continually offers exciting new quests, even beyond high school and college.

To start off, this summer I got two beehives in my back yard.  I’ve never kept bees before, but I took a class and I read lots of books and I dove in.  It was fun-hard-interesting.  I lost both of my original queen bees (one died, one swarmed) and my two bee colonies faced a crisis and could have died.  But, with a little patience and a lot of Googling, my colonies rebounded and even produced 8 quarts of honey!

This summer was also the end of one journey and the start of another because I finished writing a novel.  Almost 4 years ago, I decided to join a few students and participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  In November of 2012, I wrote 50,000 words of a novel, and over the next three and a half years, I worked on finishing and editing it.  This summer I worked every day for the entire month of June to finish.  I wrote a 4^th, 5^th and 6^th draft, and in the first week of July, I felt that I had arrived at a stopping point.  I was ready for the next stage.

What is that next stage?  I started submitting my novel to agents.  (Agents then take books to publishers to get the book published.)  I’ve emailed query letters and the first 10 pages of my novel to 104 agents.  So far, 25 agents have rejected me and 4 have liked what I sent enough to request more pages or the full manuscript.  It’s not a bad ratio, but I’ll tell you that every rejection is so hard to receive and every request for more makes me feel like I won the lottery.  If you see me in the hallway busting a move, I probably got some good feedback on what I wrote.  Sometimes the rejections are even bittersweet: one agent said that I was a good writer, my characters felt real, and the dialogue was authentic, but my book just wasn’t right for her.  And some rejections just sting, like the agent who said my sample pages weren’t as engaging as she had hoped.  Ouch.

Another big adventure is also beginning, because I am going to have a baby boy in December!  You may not know this but Mr. Griswold, who teaches math here, is my husband and this will be our third baby.  Our oldest, Calvin, is four and a half, and Matilda is two.  Mr. Griswold and I are very excited and a little nervous about going from man-on-man to zone defense (get it?).  While I’m on maternity leave in third quarter, other amazing English teachers from the department will be coming to teach your class.  You will get a chance to be inspired by the other faculty at Harpeth Hall, and I’ll be back after Spring Break.

I guess adventure is part of who I am.  As a kid, I lived all over the world for my dad’s job.  I have lived in Cincinnati, Mexico City, Caracas, Cleveland, London, and New York City before coming to Nashville.  I speak fluent Spanish and conversational Portuguese.  I got my bachelor’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and my master’s degree from NYU.  Fun fact, I was a theater and Spanish major in college, and my master’s is in Educational Theater.

I love that my life and my house are filled with the fruits of past adventures.  We live in East Nashville where we have a dog, 6 chickens and the bees.  Past years’ letters of introduction were about getting a dog and building our chicken coop.  We also have a big garden where we grow flowers and vegetables.

The beauty of constant adventures is that life is always a work in progress.  I’ve never really “arrived” and I find that my search for new experiences never ends.  Journeys also imply detours and pitfalls and scary forests.  A quest is often filled with near misses and brushes with death.  And while I am luckily not facing those kinds of obstacles, I love embracing the messiness of life on a road of discovery.  As you know from your favorite stories and novels, it’s the struggles along the way that make for the most interesting and exciting plots.  When I think about building a chicken coop or writing a novel, I could tell you about the frustration, the banged fingers, the feelings of helplessness or despair.  I could tell you about the time I realized I needed the change the verb tense and speaker of the entire novel.  Those aren’t blemishes, but rather details that enrich the value of the journey.

And I’m excited that we will start the next one together.  It can be scary to begin and take the leap, but I can say with certainty that you won’t regret it.  Along the way, you’ll probably have very high and very low moments.  You’ll question why you ever started to begin with.  You’ll think you aren’t ready or can’t handle it. You’ll wonder what made you think this was a good idea.  You’ll feel great pride in your accomplishments.  You’ll laugh hysterically and cry in frustration.  You’ll make true friends.  You’ll discover that you’re stronger than you think.  At the end, on a May day that feels a million light years away from here, you’ll look up and realize how far you’ve come without noticing.  And you won’t regret a single minute.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Griswold

Good afternoon!  As the summer draws to its end, I am working on my summer reading.  First up is my faculty read Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel.

My husband, David, is a high school math teacher and read the book a year ago.  He was obsessed.  He’d get immersed and then dive into a passionate treatise while changing diapers on why he loved the book.  He recommended it to our admin as a faculty read, and here we are.

I’m loving it.  It’s in that middle ground between the dense articles you might read in a grad program, and super pop psych books.  It gets the message across, tells some good stories, and practices what it preaches.

One big take away is that we think we know how we learn, but we really don’t.  We have a lot of lore and intuition–not much more than superstition–and most of it doesn’t amount to lasting learning.  It has some storytelling aspects, where an anecdote is told to illustrate a concept every few pages.  It’s folksy, but as a fan of stories, I’ve enjoyed the real-life illustrations.  (The one about the process for marines who learn to jump out of planes and not break their ankles was fascinating!)

For those who, like me, got their teacher education in the last decade or so (thanks NYU!), this jives with constructive learning, problem/project based learning, student-centered classrooms, etc.  If you are a chalk-and-talk or drill-and-kill person, you might not enjoy this.  The focus is on how learning is encoded, retrieved and made permanent.  Teaching is discussed, insofar as the most effective ways for students to NOT forget what you teach them.  Which, you know, is the point.

I find myself feeling lucky that I teach English.  One major message is that learning needs to be varied, spaced and interleaved (other stuff inserted in, so it’s not just one topic/skill all the time).  My class is naturally that way: first a poem, then a novel, then a few short stories.  We don’t just drill metaphors for 2 weeks, then move on to similes.  We spiral back over and over to the same concepts in different settings in different genres.  I already have a lot going for me just through the natural structure of my class.

And, there isn’t much mindless drilling in the English classes at my school.  The one exception might be in grammar.  That’s where I’ve done a lot of reflecting as I read the book.  I’ve noticed that students tend to forget one unit as soon as it’s over.  But, the problem is, they need to use apostrophes correctly FOR EVER, not just for the next two weeks.  So, my first step next year is to spiral back to the material throughout the whole year.  An apostrophe question on every quiz.  I’m also going to try to mix up my grammar practice and instruction, so it doesn’t fall into mindlessness (read the chapter, do 10 practice problems, repeat).

Another big take away I’ve enjoyed is the notion that harder learning is better learning.  When something “feels easy” to learn, it doesn’t mean you are learning it as well as you think you are.  The research Make it Stick cites shows that the harder you have to work to retrieve your learning, the deeper your learning is.  For those of you brain enthusiasts, the more you are laying down those neural pathways in different ways, the stronger they are.  If you access the learning a different way, you are strengthening it.  If you have to connect it to other things, you strengthen the pathways.  It may sound counter-intuitive, but when you read about the studies, it becomes clear.

All of this makes me excited for the year because I tell students and parents early on that I embrace a philosophy of “hard fun.”  Seymour Papert coined the phrase, and I heard it at an NCTE conference in 2007 or 2008.  It’s pretty straight forward and makes me think of building my chicken coop by myself with no plans.  It was hard, but I was having so much fun.  The idea is supported by the research that Make It Stick presents, which I now have to bolster my philosophy.  If learning feels hard, then the student is on the right track–which will be a relief for my very ambitious, eager-to-succeed students.  Too many of them view struggle as a sign of failure and poor ability.  As the book agrees, we feel that “easy” learning must be good, but the truth is easy come, easy go.

In an interesting turn of events, I noticed a pretty active hashtag on Twitter for Make it Stick.  I threw a few tweets up and pretty quickly had a lot of people, coincidentally all men, begin to debate these principles with me.  In case it needs to be said, I didn’t write the book.  If you would like to debate the merits of the sources and the research, please take it up with the authors.  Or, better yet, you could publish your own research in a peer reviewed journal and then write your own book.  I look forward to reading that.  Until then, I’d appreciate you staying out of a friendly conversation among teachers who are enjoying the book and want to stay positive about using its concepts in the classroom.

Today I am presenting the session “Bringing Literature to Life with a Maker Space” at the TAIS Tech conference.  Caitlin McLemore, our educational technology specialist at Harpeth Hall is my co-presenter.

Here is the movie I made of the project with WeVideo.

Here are is our presentation:

Below are the presentations I gave at Meet the Teacher night.  I did not get to the final slides about confidence because I ran out of time.  The first presentation was for my 9th grade parents, and the second is my honors sophomores.

*You have to press the play button in the bottom left corner.  The slides automatically advance every 10 seconds.  You can pause the presentation or manually advance or rewind.

English I:

Honors English II:

Tonight is Meet the Teacher night at my school.  I will meet with my advisee’s parents and then I will have 8 minutes with the parents of each of my classes.  It is a whirlwind and definitely a high stress evening, but it is always lovely to meet the parents.  I teach all day (with a lunch meeting thrown in) then my husband (who also teaches at the same school) and I will rush home, get the kids from day care, get them fed, and then hand it off to the babysitter.  Back to school to spruce up the room and prepare to meet the parents.

I wanted to share with you the letter of introduction I wrote to my students this year.  I’ve done this every year and it is one of my favorite rituals.  As you will see, students write me a letter back.  I keep these letters and return them right before they graduate.  It’s a nice time capsule.