What Really Matters

Thirty days ago, I set out on an adventure with 57 students. We joined in the National Novel Writing Month Young Writer’s Program and we set to writing novels with personal word count goals. At the half way point, forty students were still actively participating, with two coming to me begging to join for the last half of the month. I don’t know just yet how many will actually reach their word count, but it’s not what concerns me at all.

One of the hardest parts about my taking a leave of absence was knowing that I had to leave in the midst of this challenge. No more weekly encouragement meetings. No more recesses with my young writers typing away with me. No more clickety-clack during Daily 3 stations as some of my students worked toward their goal. I did keep up with my almost-daily encouraging emails, and I know the classroom teachers for many of the students still gave little pep talks to keep the students motivated in my absence, but I really struggled with leaving before the project was done.

Personally, for the first time in all the years that I’ve participated, I fell behind in my own word count. Further behind than I have ever been, even to the point where I wondered if I would even finish it at all. I’ve never not completed the challenge. If I set out to do it, then I’m going to do it, but obviously this year, life got a bit in the way. But, the last two days were days spent in waiting rooms and hotel rooms and treatment rooms, all places that a Chromebook works quite nicely in and so I clickety-clacked my word count up while we waited on doctors, waiting on appointments, waited to fall asleep and waiting on treatment.

Today, while I sat with my husband in the infusion treatment room typing away, I received an email message. Opening it up (happy for the distraction from typing my convoluted novel) I saw that it was from one of my students. She was telling me how hard she was working to reach her goal. She was in at recess, with the substitute teacher, typing away. I responded immediately back with my words of encouragement and confession that I was busy typing away, too. Then came another email and another, from each of the girls that usually type during recess with me. It would seem that on the last day, despite being in different places, we were all still typing together.

I have other emails in my inbox over the past month from several of the students participating in the 30-day challenge and they all more or less say the same thing. They are all behind in their word counts, having overestimated how much time they would actually spend on the project, but they were all having a blast and giving up wasn’t an option despite their slow progress.

Apparently, I needn’t have worried. All it took was to get the ball rolling and these kids just kept it going all on their own. All they needed were some words of encouragement along the way and they were off to the races. While I am sure we all would have loved to have met weekly or even more often than that, it turns out, many of the students didn’t depend on those meetings, they were able to persevere without.

Tonight, at just after nine o’clock, I finally hit 50,000 words. It’s the worst novel I’ve ever written, but I tried something new, added a dose of fantasy and I gave it a go. It was never about getting published for me. It was just about the challenge and about forcing myself to do the thing. Oh, and it was definitely about doing it with the kids. Even when friends and family told me to not worry about it for heaven’s sake, pointing out all that I have going on currently, I just couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t let the kids down. If they were determined to finish, so was I.

So, tonight, I am a NaNoWriMo winner, complete with a print-it-myself certificate and a t-shirt that’s in the mail. But far more than that, I am excited for all the kids that stuck with it, that stuck with me. For all those kids that gave this challenge a go for the first (or second!) try. I am so proud of the work they put in. I am proud for the ways they pushed through when it got hard. I am proud to see them be proud of themselves. For that is what really matters.

To all my NaNo Young Writers – you are all winners in my book tonight!