Embracing the crossing out of mistakes
No plan survives the start of teaching. Or writing. Or contact with another person.
Changed plans turn into cross-outs, scrawling new writing over old writing, and migrating notes over and again. Life, and often being productive, is messy. I still struggle to embrace the mess.
A small voice whispers that I’ve “notebooked wrong” when I have to cross notes out or write over previous writing. A part of me worries about messing up my notebooks. That voice suggests I should turn the page and start over so the whole page is perfect. That part of me assumes that all notes should look tidy, shiny, and artfully organized.
Cross-outs can also be progress
I’ve come across many approaches for avoiding cross-outs. Some folks use washi tape effectively to cover cross-outs. Place dark, opaque tape over the part of your notes that has changed, or has grown incorrect. Then simply write the revision directly onto the washi tape. Neat.
Pro: washi tape can look clean, or even intentionally artsy. Con: the time needed to grab a washi tape roll, tear off a piece, place the piece, and then write in a correction can prove distracting.
Some tapes struggle with liquid inks. This seems a strong strategy for those who use markers and inks that can write legibly on non-absorbent materials. Avoiding this con is easy if you have space on your page to cover an entire line with washi tape and rewrite that line underneath the tape.
Two reasons to appreciate crossing out words or lines of text live in-between the these pros and cons. One is that crossing out is quickly done. I can keep my train of thought and continue writing or talking or … meeting. Embracing that notes are process writing, and need not be pretty, is a victory. Who doesn’t like victory?
A second embedded reason to embrace cross-outs is that the words I use to replace what I cross out are often far better than what I initially wrote. Crossing out, in other words, is like drafting. And I rather enjoy the journey to better versions of my thinking — when I allow them to happen.
Looking deeper into the positive, crossing out a mistake or notes that have changed since first recorded is an excuse to change pens and inks. Switching colors helps to highlight what I actually want to record. Or to visually mark an idea that could use further reflection. Mistakes, I’m reminded, are useful. They’re part and parcel of thinking smartly.
So, against my habitual compulsions, I’m working on embracing the mess of crossed out notes. And I’m finding joy in letting the mess stand on its own in my notebooks. To embracing mistakes. To accepting mess. And to quieting the perfectionist voice we all hear from time to time. Some sort of clever ending.
This week’s Inked Tines update includes my most recent currently inked writing tools.
Toolset
Pens. This week’s standout combo is the Kaweco Frosted Sport in Light Blueberry. Sporting one of Kaweco’s new premium EF nibs, and dressed in the minimally-translucent plastic on this edition of the Sport, this pairing is a smile creator. The premium EF nib enjoyed Warped Passages. The forgiving and reliable combo proved great for pocket notes and scratch notes. Served as a backup daily driver on Thursday until I was able to ink up the new Jinhao. Only the ink in the feed is left.
Platinum 3776 (F) — Empty. Disciplined narrow F fine. Smooth writer that allowed Oyster Grey to dry quickly. Avoided smearing and the need to wait for ink to dry before moving from one task to another. Subdued coloring was well-suited to meetings with families. Daily driver. Task management, reading notes, lesson plans (structure), scratch notes.
Franklin-Christoph 31 (M SIG) — Empty. A wet enough combo to take the bite out of the M SIG grind. Used mostly for journaling and for headings during meetings.
Sailor Pro Gear (H-F) — Feed. Served well as a meeting notes combo. Exceptional during an hour-long phone meeting, even when held uncapped for minutes at a time. Meeting notes, accent notes, lecture notes, journaling.
Franklin-Christoph 46 (EF SIG) — 1/5. The sharpness of the EF SIG grind limits this pair to desktop writing. This week’s nomadism limited the usefulness of this pen and ink. However, they did find their ways into my journaling routine this week. Journaling, lesson plans, some reading notes.
Nakaya Neostandard (B) — 1/5. Did not see much use this week. I like this B nib for journaling and writing out lesson plans. Other than two plans, this pen sat in the penvelope. Lesson plans.
Kaweco Sport Fox (EF) — 3/4. Marking both student drafts and my own. The orange pops well. The nib writes well, with infrequent hard starts. The clip is excellent at sliding over the fabric of coat pockets. Daily carry for pocket notes. Marking, accent meeting notes, lesson plans.
Notebooks. Work bujo. Musubi Cosmo Air Light 83 (A5). 17 new pages in the work bullet journal. The notebook is up to page 152. The Musubi has 208 printed pages. At this rate, I may need (and by “need” I mean “totally have an excuse to”) a third work bullet journal before the school year is out. Shopping for new notebooks and papers again is a welcome come-down after workdays.
And this week was a meticulous brand of busy. The first two pages are the typical weekly spread. A tracker of lessons for each class meeting throughout the week with daily task lists below.
Class progress tracking via cross-outs
A one-page monthly spread for November follows. I was unable to build the spread and sit for a monthly goals reflection until Friday. That sequence is wonky. I would prefer to have my monthly spreads done before the first week of a month begins.
It’s done now. And pulling the monthly spread together reminded me of a guest speaker series I want on the calendar in January. And the spread was fun to pull together. Gotta have fun.
Eight pages house meeting notes. Four of those pages were written with a notebook perched on my lap. That makes for an odd writing angle. I turned to round nibs for these meetings. They accommodate odd, sometimes severe, writing angles.
Rock meetings with orange
The remaining six pages are lesson plan outlines and reading notes.
Journal. Taroko Breeze (A5). This week was light on journaling. I wrote two new entries; one on Sunday and another Wednesday evening. Both were long-form reflections on happenings in my personal world. Six new pages bring my personal journal to page 122 — out of 183 numbered and dotted pages. Progress.
Four pens met paper while journaling. Sunday’s reflection wrote the Franklin-Christoph 31 to the feed. The M SIG nib was wet enough to bring out Extra Dimension’s sheen at the ends of lines — where the nib lingers briefly between new letters and new words. It was a fun journaling combination.
Halloween’s entry was completed entirely with this pairing. The poem afterwards is in Warped Passages — an unsaturated denim blue. A like an EF nib for transcribing poetry. Narrow lines allow more words on each line.
Wednesday’s reflection stuck with narrow lines. I turned to the Sailor Pro Gear’s H-F nib for the body of my journaling. Yozakura would darken at the beginnings of sentences and grow lighter by the ends of sentences. The result is a cool, new-to-me repeating gradient.
The good kind of shady
My week’s journaling ended with a short poem by Assata Shakur, written in Candy Marsala. The haloing I get, even inked as it is in an EF nib, is positively joyful. A breath of fresh air.
Love me a prominent halo
Written dry. Three pens went desert on me this week. A pen running dry is a fun accomplishment. Especially as I enjoy changing inks often. This week was exciting on the empty pen front.
Look who has a day of pen cleaning ahead of him
The Lamy ate it early Sunday morning while building out my weekly task management spread for work. Luckily, the combo survived just long enough to finish building out the structure of my weekly.
The Franklin-Christoph 31 (Tuesday) and Platinum 3776 (Thursday) went down while at work. The 31 had the good grace to dry up at the end of a school day. Right in the middle of some diversity and equity planning notes.
The Platinum rudely ran dry Thursday afternoon during a meeting. I quickly swapped over to the Kaweco Blueberry to finish out the afternoon.
An additional two pen and ink combinations are also down to only their feeds: the Kaweco Blueberry (EF) and the Sailor Pro Gear (H-F).
Newly inked. I just had to ink the new Jinhao 9035. After some early scrawling, I opted for a nib swap. I pulled the nib and feed out of the Jinhao and replaced them with a Franklin-Christoph nib and feed. The result: I have a wood pen with a lovely F cursive italic ground by Mike Masuyama.
The ol’ Masuyama magic
Inked with Diamine Earl Grey, this pairing became Friday’s daily driver.
The collection
Incoming / new orders. Two pens returned to my desk this week. The Parker Vacumatic that I sent out for repair and the all-black Lamy Safari that I loaned to a good friend last year.
My vintage Parker Vacumatic rolled back in from its pen resort recovery trip. Aaron at Pentiques packed the pen securely for its return trip. The adventure took two weeks, start to finish.
Fresh off the mail truck
Clearly — morally? ethically? — this Vac should roll into my currently inked for next week. The Parker sports a bi-color F nib. Pretty.
Old and wise. That arrow knows where the action is.
Last year, I loaned my All-Black Lamy Safari to a great friend. He was exploring his options for a black pen that could work as his everyday carry. the Safari is a solid low-entry pen that can withstand the abusing kinds of work a band director sees.
He spent months with my pen. Those months cemented in his mind that he wants to go in another direction. Welcome back, All-Black. Job well done.
Outgoing / trades or sales. All quiet on this front.
Currently reading and listening
Fiction. Work took over my schedule this week. My reading time in the evenings proved a casualty. I haven’t opened Dune Messiah since last week. Hopefully the Muad’dib is patient.
The only fiction storytelling I took in this week has been during my daily commutes to and from school. I started listening to the Harry Potter series. My generation grew as readers alongside the series, and Rowling’s own expanding writing chops. Revisiting the series is proving nostalgic.
I finished the first book, Sorcerer’s Stone, on Thursday’s evening commute. It’s short. And Fry gives a touching performance. I’m presently seven chapters into the second book, Chamber of Secrets.
Gilderoy Lockheart is a depressingly poor educator, by design. That said, I’m struck by just how poor the other teachers’ methods are, too. Teacher-centered and lecture-heavy. I’m clearly reading far too deeply into how Hogwarts functions as a school. Even so: boo.
Nonfiction. I dove back into the historical archives this week. Specifically, I’ve been hunting through Niccolò Machiavelli’s personal correspondence. The process is less creepy than it reads.
The goal is to find a a short letter, with a clear English translation, that discusses his thinking about writing The Prince. I’ve been using a 1513 letter from Machiavelli to his friend Francesco Vettori — a diplomat stationed in Rome. And, to date, it still seems to best primary source for my students to analyze. It’s only two pages. The language is direct. And Machiavelli overtly mentions why he’s writing The Prince.
I leaned heavily on the Blueberry Kaweco and a Blackwing pencil for marking up other letters. I read 22 printed pages of correspondence with pen and pencil in hand this week.
Music. My music listening has happened within two different personalities. At work, I stuck to an energetic piano-forward artist, Giovanni Allevi. Allevi played underneath all of my teaching this week. Modern piano with Howard Stern hair.
At home, I was looking for more energy. The Decemberists’ operatic Hazards of Love played over and again throughout the week. This is an album worth listening to in order. Many of the tracks blend into one another. You’ll look up after an hour and wonder how the album is already over.
