Response to Chee "The Writing of Life", Le Guin "The Operating Instructions" and Christensen Intro

After completing the readings, I found myself focusing particularly on the reading The Writing Life by Alexander Chee and how hard she was willing to work to become a writer. Often times when reading this sort of text I have to start over because my thoughts will drift, however I was pleasantly surprised when this piece succesfully captured my complete attention. Personally I have never felt very passionate about writing, I find myself lacking creativity. Typically when I've completed assignments in the past I am able to do well because I am able to correctly respond to the given prompts. I often struggle to properly put my ideas into words and as a result will spend hours restarting assignments that for many people would take a lot less time. Even with this blog post I've completely erased my work at least a dozen times. Being such an indecisive person makes small decisions a lot more stressful than they should be and leaves me uncertain about almost all of my choices. I am even unsure of whether or not I made the right choice in deciding to pursue a career as in English teacher because while I have always loved reading and analyzing texts, my ability to write is average. Only my desire to be a teacher has remained constant.

While reading the several introduction pages by Linda Christensen, I found myself feeling very strongly about what I was reading. This reading made me start to think more about not only the type of teacher I want to be, but I also found myself thinking about what books I would like to someday teach in my own curriculum. I have always found reading and books to be extremely important as often times they can provide an escape to the readers. Not only that, but I also feel as people can draw on books to help them with their daily lives or even make a person more tolerant and understanding of people that are different than they are. Christensen states that "All students need to see themselves reflected in the curriculum" (Christensen 6), something that I very strongly agree with. However this means that teachers need to start including more diversity in their book selection. Looking back at the different books that were assigned in High School, I can't think of any book that included a character that gave us an LGBTQ perspective. There also was a lack of books that show what it's like to have different mental illnesses. Both of these topics are extremely important, especially to students in Middle or High school as these are both very relevant.