Making Progress

Monday 15th April 2024, 4521 words written (2729 added to Beyond the Clouds, 951 in flash pieces and 841 added to short stories), 0 new rejections, 0 new agent queries, 1 competition entered, reading Trio by William Boyd and re-read Here is the Beehive for book club, 3 new book purchases, 2 coffees, 1 lemon and ginger tea, and a Fry’s Turkish Delight

Progress is a word ingrained into every teacher’s vocabulary. Yet it means something different for every pupil. Some pupils make accelerated progress in certain areas but can have a deficit in others. Teachers (and parents) often use stories like Aesop’s fables to remind pupils of life lessons such as ‘slow and steady wins the race’. In this analogy I am the tortoise. The vast differences in pupil progress over time and our education system’s obsession with reviewing it can make school, for teachers and pupils, a grind. We constantly compare pupils to their peers, to the national age related expectations, to their former and future selves. It is one of the great injustices of our education system that some pupils sit their SATs and GCSEs on the cusp of twelve and seventeen, whereas others are a whole calendar year behind. Anyone who is a parent knows that a year in a child’s development, even in a young adult, is significant. Everything can change.

When I first taught in FE I only taught literacy and refused to teach basic maths to learning support pupils. Despite achieving a respectable grade C at GCSE, my constant underachievement in set 2 meant I lacked self-confidence in this subject. I never could have imagined myself teaching mathematics. A year into the position at college, I folded under departmental pressure and agreed to teach maths. I was thirty-four and had never mastered long division and found probability problems painful. With revision, I began to question why my sixteen-year-old self had been unable to grasp these concepts. Now as an experienced teacher, I know why. Time. The development of my brain was not ready or I hadn’t been shown a method that worked for my learning style. I taught basic maths for three years, thirteen years ago. If you asked me to teach long division now, I couldn’t. I’d have to return to the study books again.

Progress is not linear and it does not follow a neatly defined gradient on a graph (I hope I have my maths terms correct). Your age, your confidence, your experience all make a difference, as does the amount of practice you put in. My journey along this yellow brick road to publication is slower than I would like, but I am making progress. I write every week for this blog and because I share how much I have written creatively, it motivates me to develop my work in progress too. This blog keeps my eyes on my goal of traditional publication. As the writer Toby Litt says – there are no wasted hours.

I have no idea why I cannot gain the interest of an agent but regardless of this, with every word I write I make progress. I may not have an editor but every bit of feedback I receive from a friend, a beta-reader, a judge, helps me make progress. In the last ten days I have taken 4521 word-sized steps on my journey and my competition feedback helped me improve my opening to You Can See the End of the World From Here.

One thing we should never do is stop moving forward. With my new opening needing some breathing space, I spent my last few days of the Easter holidays editing my second novel. It has been reworked so many times over the last twelve years you would think I would be sick of it. I’m not. I still believe in this story and I still believe in myself.

With spring in the air I will do my best to ignore the hares racing past me on their publication journey and I’ll focus on maintaining my tortoise like pace until I reach that elusive finish line.

Kate