As I worked on compiling the items for my portfolio, I discovered that choosing what I wanted to include was not as difficult as I thought it would be. While there are many pieces that I could have selected, the ones that I wrote about in my Annotated Table of Contents all represent my education as a writer.
It was clear early on what these pieces said about me as a writer. I do my best writing, my most meaningful writing, when I take risks as a writer and as a thinker. The only exception is the Thank You notes that I wrote as a child with my mother. While I didn’t take any risks as a writer because my mother helped me with what to write, by modeling the composing process, my mother enabled me to know how to take risks in the future.
Other than the Thank You notes, the other pieces do represent some sort of risk that I’ve taken: even though I liked my idea for my Shakespeare paper and I thought I was onto something, I didn’t know if my professor would agree; both pieces for my Reading Nonfiction class were experimental and pushed me outside my comfort zones as a writer; it was a gamble to share personal writing with my students, but it paid off by enabling them to dig deeper to add more personal insight into their own writing; the Writing Strategies Menu that I’m continuously working on is a also a risk because I don’t know if it will actually work the way I want it to; and the poem I wrote was more of an intellectual risk because I tried my hand at poetry.
Whether any of these writing efforts were successful in the traditional sense doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that I learned something about myself as a person and as a writer through each of them, which is something I want to recreate for my students. It is difficult to take risks and students are often reluctant to do so. I hope that through sharing my own experiences and my own writing with my students, that they will feel emboldened to try risks in their writing.
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