“Yeah, I feel like I supported my theme statement. I hope I made the reader think I had a happy life and I hope they realize that I set a goal in life based on my happiness.”

There’s a messy middle. It can’t be written in a rubric. It can’t be named by a number or labeled by a letter. It can’t be leveraged by a level. It’s a mess, and it’s messy because it exists there between reader-writer, teacher-learner, person-person.

Once upon a classroom, when I found myself in the messy middle, I tried to master the mess, relying on rubrics, naming with numbers, labeling with letters, leveraging with levels, but I never mastered the mess; I just masked the mess, hoping my kids wouldn’t challenge my charade.

But I have begun to move away from the masquerade. I no longer attempt to master or mask the mess when I find myself in the middle. I reach out to the other side. In this case, I reached out to the writer.

I imagine, at some point, we’ve all found ourselves there in the messy middle, where we know, but we don’t know, and the masks (rubrics, letters, etc.) just don’t quite cover it. Yesterday, I found myself mired in the middle.

I was responding to his diary entries from our Wisdom Writers Project, and I was stuck. Sure but unsure. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for based on the requirements and criteria. But it wasn’t exactly not what I was looking for either. It wasn’t a yes. It wasn’t a no. And while that may sound off to some who rely on rubrics, I think those who have really reflected on their responses to student writing know that there is a space that exists between, a messy middle, made more so by the human on the other end of the work: the student writer. The other person in the person-person.

So, I reached out to him.

Do you think you supported your theme statement? I am not saying you did or didn’t. I just want to know your thoughts.

And today, I will respond back to him.

Okay, thank you. I find myself in agreement. Thank you for sharing your perspective. It helped me. Let’s call this good.

It’s still a maybe in the strictest sense, I suppose. But I am not editing a bestseller here. I am responding to the work of a developing writer. And when things come to meet in the messy middle, I am going to rely on my human instincts rather than my rubric to make sense of the mess in the middle.

Happy Thursday, all. Out of time this morning.

Do. Reflect. Do Better.