Tag Archives: learning

Why I Write

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(January 6th, 2026)

I’ve tried to blog countless times since school started this fall, and well, if I am honest, I’ve felt overwhelmed ever since Charlie Kirk’s tragic death.  There still are no words.  No matter what I have to say, all I could think of is that it could potentially add to the hate, and that would never be my intention.  It isn’t that I didn’t or don’t have anything to say.  No.  Quite the opposite.  I have so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin.  Sometimes, it just comes to you.  Sometimes, you just have to start again.

On rare days as a teacher you may have small wins.  Sometimes a lesson goes particularly well; it may finally “click” for that student you’ve been worried about all school year.  A small victory in the grand scheme of things, but invaluable when you truly care.  It is the same with writing.  There are times where you just have to get it down before it is gone forever.  It may not be perfect, but there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere.  On the rarest of rare occasions, both happen on the same day within the hour.  That was my day today, but first, a little background.

My dream of creating a creative writing club for my students may have started during my years teaching middle school at St. Mike’s, but I had no idea where it would lead.  At St. Mike’s, my teacher bestie Dorri and I teamed up to form a group for students grades 3-8 interested in writing.  We were small but mighty – and we even survived a pandemic.  I wish others could have witnessed the patience that my middle schoolers had with Dorri’s budding 3rd grade authors.  Dorri and I may no longer teach together, but we still bring up the magic that happened during writing club.  In fact, this fall, I learned that one of my former students, one of those patient middle schoolers now a high school senior, will soon have a short story published in an anthology.  He couldn’t be more deserving or have a brighter future.

Last year, my first year as a full-fledged teacher at Michigan Virtual Charter Academy (MVCA) teaching 10th grade high school English, I knew that I wanted to try again.  I wanted to create a creative writing club for our high school.  Throughout the school year, we became a tight knit group of writers who wholeheartedly supported one another.  I hated to see it end. This year, I didn’t know if I could create that atmosphere twice.

Fortunately, I did.  Even though I have an almost entirely new group of students this year, they are just as supportive and passionate about writing.  Above all, they are wonderful writers.  In fact, in addition to sharing what I wrote today during our session, I wish I could share some of my students’ work as well.  They are far more talented than I ever was during my high school years.  It is beautiful to see and gives me so much hope for the future.  Gen Z – and what I’ve witnessed of Gen Alpha – are far more compassionate and understanding than the Gen Xers, Xennials, and Millennials I grew up with.  They seem to grasp just how much damage mere words can do.  They also understand that there is more to life than work, image, and material things.

So, I decided to share with you what I wrote today in the span of twenty minutes.  It is not perfect, but it is a start.  There is something there.  In that same twenty minutes, one of my students created a piece so wonderful that it is begging to be shared.  I am hoping to get at least a paragraph of her work in the yearbook. Yes, 2026 is off to a great start. Today was a good day.

Why I Write …

I write to not be forgotten.

I write to calm the storm and slow down time.

I write to express and gather my thoughts and ideas.

I write to make sense of the chaos trying to drown me.

To create order out of chaos.

I write to explain the inexplicable.

I write to support and inspire others.

I write to find meaning where there is none.

I write to remember what shouldn’t be forgotten.

To capture what could be lost, what shouldn’t be lost.

I write to learn and study.

I write to make connections and share with others.

I write to expand my understanding of everything around me.

I write to learn how to teach others to write, wonder, and explore.

To create, to connect, to describe.

Becoming Ms. Russell

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I did not set out to become a teacher, I left that to my younger sister Erica.  As her older sister, I’ve never known her to want to be anything other than a teacher and a mother.  I envied the fact that she was so certain about her desired profession, not to mention her dedication to her love of children.  When we played school – and we did often – I ended up being the school librarian while she insisted on being the teacher.  Until our younger brother was born when I was age 10 and Erica age 7, we didn’t have a single pupil.  By the time he was two, Erica made our toddler brother a series of report cards, grading him on things like “listening” and “sitting still.”  But, this isn’t my sister’s story.  It is mine.

My story of pursuing a career as a secondary teacher is by no means conventional.  In fact, it is so unconventional and challenging that I would recommend it to no one.  If it weren’t for the facts that teaching is in my DNA and I am meant to be a teacher, I would have given up long, long ago.  Instead, I doubled-down when I was faced with what at the time seemed to be insurmountable obstacles.  I even went back to substitute teaching when needed while deciding what my next step would be.  I am a better person, and teacher, for it.

Every story needs to start somewhere, and mine starts with the statement that teaching is in my blood.  It truly is.  As a genealogist, as far as I can tell, the teaching tradition goes back at least five generations on my mom’s side of the family.  It likely goes back even further.  Both of Mom’s grandmothers taught, and one of her grandfathers served as principal of his daughters’ elementary school, as well as coach.   

Interestingly, the teaching careers of my great-grandmothers could not have been more different.  I knew both Grammy Bea (Beatrice Williams), who taught kindergarten and first grade for decades at the height of the baby boom, and Great (Leona Buttrick), who taught in a one-room schoolhouse and quit teaching once she married my great-grandfather Hatley.  Although these are stories for another time, their careers illustrate massive changes in public education.

Funnily enough, the teaching tradition isn’t exactly confined to mom’s side of the family.  Even though neither of my dad’s parents had the opportunity to further their education, they highly encouraged their children to do so.  Both did, and even though my dad and his sister didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on much of anything, I find it telling that they both married teachers.  On the Suszko side of Dad’s family, there are several special education and agricultural teachers.  In fact, my cousin Kristy, a woman with whom I attended school at all levels from kindergarten to college, now teaches dairy science at the university level.

As much as I did not want to admit it, I am a teacher.  It took me far too long to make peace with that fact.  Something inside me would not let it go.  As soon as I graduated from Michigan State in 2004 with degrees in supply chain management and Spanish, my entire world shifted.  It would not be made right again until I went back to school in 2013.

It all started during the Great Recession with a casual conversation with my ex’s mom Cindy.  We were invited to dinner as usual, and Cindy and I struck up a conversation.  She told me that she wished that she’d gone back to school to become a nurse.  All I could think at the time was that I did not want to be in my 50s and regret not pursuing an interest.  During the Christmas shopping season of 2008, I worked at Best Buy in   Saginaw.  As I lived in the South End of Bay City at the time, I drove by Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) every day on my way to work.  Slowly, I started to wonder what would happen if I did decide to go back to school to become a teacher.  The idea excited me and fed my imagination. How could I make it happen?  How would I adjust?  Online classes, in their infancy back in 2004, intimidated me.

Eventually, I had the ability to make it happen in 2013.  I largely enjoyed my time at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU), although I would advise commuter students to do their homework.  For example, if I had not followed up with my advisor, I would have stressed out about the math portion of the general MTTC exam necessary to even apply to the College of Education.  I didn’t necessarily doubt my ability to do higher-level math likely trigonometry and low-level calculus, but I had not remotely touched those subjects in well over a decade.  The thought terrified me. Much to my relief, my counselor informed me that I scored high enough on the ACT test I took in high school that I did not need to take the general MTTC at all.  I then questioned why I wasn’t informed earlier.  She simply stated that it likely stemmed from the fact that I was a commuter and a non-traditional student.  While I would highly recommend SVSU to traditional college students coming right from high school, I’m not so sure in other situations.

I enjoyed most of my classes and professors at both Delta College and SVSU, but I can’t say that I didn’t have any bad experiences.  In fact, one professor and class at SVSU stands out for all of the wrong reasons.  This particular professor taught a class that focused on diversity.  However, somehow, throughout the entire semester, he managed to offend nearly everyone in the class.  Horribly.  He supposedly hated coaches.  When I ran into a former classmate in a school setting years later, we naturally discussed this infamous class and professor.  This man, who happened to coach as well as teach, informed me that this professor tried to get him removed from the College of Education program, likely because he planned to coach.

Somehow, this professor appeared to have no issue with me or one of my good friends, even though he had long ago deeply offended us both.  As we paired up to complete our main teaching project for the course, things fell apart.  When it came time to “teach” our project, our professor respected my teaching time and even seemed pleased.  Then, he proceeded to continually interrupt my friend and teaching partner for her entire portion of the project.  He made it exceedingly difficult for her to even finish.  Already extraordinarily introverted, I have no idea how she made it through.  Disrespectful doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Unfortunately, she never did become a teacher, although she would have been wonderful.  Instead, she became a librarian.  To this day, I still believe that the world needs introverted teachers too.  There are too many people like this professor that discourage future teachers every step of the way before they even get started.

Stay tuned … There is much more to this story.

Not just my favorite TED Talk on education and teaching, my favorite TED Talk period.

Rita Pierson’s famous Ted Talk on Education – Well worth watching!