The last three months have been an interesting step into the unknown for me.  I’ve been casually writing for a couple of years now but this was the first time I had an editor.  The opportunity to write for a peer reviewed periodical was going to be exciting and something out of my comfort zone so I jumped at the chance.  After all, I love to write and I get pretty good feedback, albeit from family and friends.  So I quickly took one of my blogs as the foundation and built upon it to send in to the editor.

The initial response to my first draft was positive. and in my naivete I thought, well, this will be easy!  Then things got serious.  Now I had to use the editing feature in Word to make comments and changes, something I only remember doing once or twice in grad school and I’m not sure I got it even then.  Then came the next edit, then the next and the next.  And all of a sudden, my story didn’t sound like me anymore.  Someone else’s words and thoughts and point of view had taken over, making me wonder who had really written this.  My initial excitement gradually turned to frustration, then anger and then a hopelessness.  Maybe I wasn’t a good writer at all.  The editor had added new paragraphs with new sources and citations I hadn’t originally included, with a philosophical slant that wasn’t mine. I didn’t recognize the new article as being me at all.

I allowed this silly thing to make me a frustrated grump, feeling like I had no choice.  After all, this person was the expert, right?  What did I know?  Then, like I tend to do, after I cry and stomp a little (I’m not proud of it), I took a deep breath and asked myself, what am I supposed to learn from this?  What do I know about myself that makes me a good writer?  What can I deal with and what do I need to stand up for in my writing?  Yes, words are important, but if they say what I wanted to say in a more “eloquent” way, and still keep the meaning, I can be ok.  And where they veered away from my original meaning, I can say no and explain why.  And that’s what I did.

Long story short, we’re getting to the end of the process and I feel ok about it.  And I’ve learned.  First, when I find an editor for my book, it will be an editor who guides but who does it in such a way that it allows my voice to be heard.   It will be my story, from my perspective and it will be unique.  Secondly, as these experiences tend to do, it made me think of  how this lesson can be applied to life and teaching.

First, how many times do we “edit” our students?  We get them as a unique person and then we spend the rest of their school careers trying to edit them into the image of what we believe successful looks like.  Edited to the point where they are no longer themselves, where they look and sound like everyone else and they aren’t sure of what they’re voice is anymore.  I’m not sure we know what to do with students who have unique stories anymore. They make us uncomfortable.

We do this to people in general.  Rather than see each person for the unique human being they are, we edit them down to fit our idea of what this person should be.  It makes it easier for us to decide if they match the edited version of ourselves, if they fit the vision we have for the world in general.  While we love stories and we’re inspired by stories, it’s too much trouble to listen to people’s stories and even more problematic to deal with the messiness of people’s stories.  So we edit them.  We limit their stories in order to pigeonhole them into the image we want.  It makes it easier to label and categorize them.  It also makes it easier to decide if we agree with them or not, if we love or hate them.

I’ve learned a lot from this exercise.  I’ve learned I will work towards not letting anyone edit my story.  I am who I am, I believe what I believe, I am open to other thoughts and change, but ultimately, my story is my story.  What is your story and is someone trying to edit that story?