LELA House

Tag: benefit

  • Reading and Journaling Improve Mental Acuity

    Reading and Journaling Improve Mental Acuity

    My first job out of college was as a hall director and director of minority affairs at a small college. I later added early alert coordinator to my list of duties. I loved it, but ever restless, I left to pursue full-time graduate studies. While in graduate school, I taught composition and African American studies courses. I spoke one day with a mentor, explaining to her I wanted to work in both the academic affairs and student affairs sides of higher education. I loved my co-curricular work in residence life, and I loved my teaching work. She told me doing both would be impossible. I understood her point, but I never accepted her premise.

    Before completing my doctorate, I got a job directing a writing center at a different university. To say I loved my work would be a gross understatement of the truth. Writing centers are magical places that support writers, readers, learners, students, faculty, and anyone who stops by. I got to teach courses, work with students and faculty directly on their writing, supervise a staff of students and professionals, plan the trajectory of a campus-wide service, and dip my toes in the activities of the other services under the academic resource center umbrella. Plus, I had amazing colleagues. I neared the nirvana of working in both academic and student affairs. But I got swept by a tide of restlessness that propelled me in a swift trajectory from position to position.

    Next I worked as an assistant director of the academic resource center, which was a great dual appointment between the student-facing center and the faculty development center. I also served as the campus plagiarism czar. Then I became a high school teacher, the hardest job I’ve ever had. I loved my students, and I loved teaching them, but I didn’t love the thing that is being a high school teacher. Everyone told me my second year would be better, but one person, my department chair, told me I should stop. She said, “Roshaunda, your passion for your students and your expertise are clear. But you don’t like being a teacher, so you shouldn’t keep doing that to yourself.” I belatedly realized she was right. I left teaching high school a worn out wreck. Reading and journaling helped sustain me, but they didn’t make me fit into something I wasn’t designed for. I figured I must only be designed to run writing centers, so I got a job running the writing center of a large online university. I loved it, but I got restless. Now I’m a life coach and writing coach who supports educators through coaching and various reading and writing activities.

    During this decades-long cycle of gaining experience and managing restlessness, I read and journaled. At various points I did them habitually or sporadically, depending on my mental and emotional state. Once I started teaching high school, however, reading and journaling became daily habits that I’ve realized I need. Reading and journaling helped me understand myself better, improve mental clarity and focus, increase empathy, and enhance my creativity and problem solving ability.

    Self Knowledge. As you read, you learn what you like and resonate with as you explore authors, characters and genres. Journaling helps you discover trends in your thoughts and behaviors as you track your personal development over time. Regular journaling creates a historical record of where you were, where you hoped to be, steps you took, and where you are now.

    Clarity and Focus. Reading forces you to concentrate for extended periods of time and practice following storylines and arguments, thus improving your clarity and focus. Journaling helps you transfer ideas from your head to paper, which opens up mental capacity to think, process, and solve, rather than using up all of your mental space for storage. Increased clarity and focus also yield improved ability to understand and pursue your goals.

    Empathy. Reading about other people’s lives and struggles helps you put your own challenges into perspective and empathize for others. Writing from your own perspective, then rereading and reflecting on it, helps you understand other’s perspectives more readily. Journaling about gratitude similarly improves your ability to put yourself into someone else’s place.

    Creativity and Problem Solving. Reading improves your analytical skills and memory. Following a complex storyline or argument requires you to store, recall, and reconfigure information. Reading also opens you to various types of problems and ways to solve them you may not have experienced in your life. These lessons boost your creativity and problem solving acumen in everyday life. Exploring your thinking and psyche through journaling reveals and produces patterns you didn’t realize existed, which unlocks your creative problem solving in all areas. Also, playing with words and language and style boosts your creativity. Boosts in creativity spill over across your entire life.

    Through years of reading and journaling – years of honing my insight, clarity, empathy, and creativity – I realized I am desperately passionate about education in all its facets. I want to know everything about PK-12, higher ed, public, private, secular, religious, students, faculty, administrators, and anything else education has to reveal to me. I want to understand how and why we as individuals, families, institutions, and as a nation journey through our education system. I strive to know what we mean by good education and knowledgeable citizenry. I am called to create ways to support educators and learners both inside and outside of classrooms, regardless of how impossible the task may seem. Restlessness didn’t propel my job changes; desire did – desire to experience, understand, and grow the field I love. I’ll recognize my next leap for what it will be, a strategic step in my transformation journey.

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    I am doing a 31-day series on reading and journaling as self care for educators. Each day of the series has bonus journal prompts. Click to join the LELA House family of educators committed to nourishing their reading, writing, and creative souls. You’ll receive a link to the journal prompts and gain early access to upcoming LELA House ideas, courses, and products. You only need to subscribe once. I will add a new worksheet each day to the access link.

    Roshaunda D. Cade, Ph.D. is an educator, writer, and creator.  She offers life coaching and writing coaching to educators, as well as other opportunities for educators to practice self- care through reading and writing. Check out her LELA House website to learn more about her services.  Roshaunda lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband and teenage children and enjoys reading, writing, dancing, and pushing her creative boundaries.  

  • Journaling and Reading Offer the Benefit of Risk in the Safety of Privacy

    Journaling and Reading Offer the Benefit of Risk in the Safety of Privacy

    My friend had planned an escapade and somehow convinced me to go along. I would get permission to spend the night at her house. I spent much of my time at her house, anyway. I ate dinner over there, probably as much as I ate at my house. Check. After dinner, we would take our sleeping bags out to their backyard fort to sleep under the stars. Check. Then we would sneak out of her back fence, walk halfway to her boyfriend’s house, and meet him and his best friend at a predetermined location for my friend and her boyfriend to do whatever it is 8th grade lovers did in the 1980s.

    We executed steps one and two flawlessly. I’m surprised I made it through dinner without tipping off her parents, though. I had on all black, because I figured I needed to be in ninja mode if I were sneaking out of houses and walking through town in the middle of the night. And I was jumpy. Her parents probably chalked it up to my being an 8th grader, as 8th graders are not known for their rational behavior.

    Things got dicey once we got out to the backyard. We hauled our gear into the fort with no difficulty, but as we descended the fort’s ladder prior to leaving the yard, my friend’s dogs started nosing around us. At the time she had three basset hounds. Two were named Bonnie and Clyde, but I forget the name of the third. All three were related in some weird incestuous way my friend assured me was normal for dogs, but I remained skeptical. I suppose the dogs sensed our nervous energy, because they wouldn’t leave us alone. They wanted to play, nipping at us, yipping, and making it impossible to leave out the back gate.

    We eventually got the dogs into a far recess of the yard and sauntered over to the gate with about as much cool as Baby saying, “I carried a watermelon” in Dirty Dancing. We dashed open the gate to make a break for it, but the dogs bounded through before we could shut it. Two stage whispering 8th grade girls and three yowling basset hounds took to the neighborhood streets that night. I’d never seen my friend’s dogs move more quickly than a jog, so watching them bolt through the streets like they had zombies at their tails mesmerized me.

    The dogs separated into two different directions. My friend went after the duo, pausing long enough to shake me out of my reverie and shoo me after the other one. At that point in my life, I’d never had a pet – not a fish, not a hamster, nothing. I ran after that dog with no idea what I would do if I caught up with it. It turned out I would do nothing. In the time it took me to catch up with one dog, my friend had caught the other two, corralled them in her yard, and found me still running after the last dog. She collared it, and we rushed back to her yard, lamenting our long-past rendezvous time.

    We eventually made it out of the back gate only to find my friend’s boyfriend and his friend standing on the other side of the fence waiting for us. About 30 feet away from my friend’s back gate was a median marking the entry to the neighborhood. We settled there, with my friend and her boyfriend on one side of the neighborhood sign, and his friend and me on the other. Despite my ninja gear and nerves, we spent the entire night in our neighborhood, never venturing beyond territory we explored every day.

    Yet that was the riskiest thing I’d ever done. I was certain my mother would kill me if she found out. My mom did a lot of things, but one thing she didn’t do was play. I don’t know that I’ve ever told her this story. If I don’t post any more blogs, you’ll know what happened.

    What I planned to do that night was stupid and deserving of my mother’s ire. What I did, however, really wasn’t that dangerous. I never left my neighborhood. I literally was never more than a few minutes walk from my house. I wasn’t alone. Even when my friend and I separated, I was always within shouting distance of a neighbor who knew me. It wasn’t that late. We probably left my friend’s backyard around 10p and returned around midnight.

    I took risks, and I learned from them. But I did so in a relatively safe atmosphere. Certainly we risked detection and punishment, and we also risked violence (sexual, physical, and other) from the boys we met. I don’t mean to minimize this, but in our particular neighborhood, at that particular moment in history, with people we knew, the likelihood of a poor outcome was reasonably low.

    Writing and reading can seem similarly risky, but done in the safe atmosphere of a journal and your own personal space, the danger is low. Be honest. Be curious. Don’t censor yourself. Your journaling and reading are for you.

    Many of us understand the risks of writing. What if someone sees what I write? What if they don’t like it? What if they don’t like me? What if I offend them? What if I’m not good at writing? What if this is bad? Who am I to write on this subject? Who am I to consider publication? All of those fears from your internal critic can keep you from writing, but a journal isn’t a public forum. A journal is a private, safe, judgment-free space for you to write out your heart. To try out new styles. To test out new genres. To tackle unusual ideas. To dive into your soul. To find out who you really are.

    Reading comes with its own risks. What does it say about me that I only read this genre? What will it say about me if I try out different genres? What about genres I’ve always been afraid to try? What if I fall behind on my necessary reading by pursuing pleasure reading? What if this is frivolous? What will I learn? How will that change me? Who will I become? Those fears also stem from your internal critic, but your personal reading time is your safe, judgment free space to reinforce neural pathways. To explore. To think. To wander. To dream. To learn. To grow.

    If I could go back to 8th grade, I wouldn’t agree to traipse around town to meet up with some boys, but I also wouldn’t erase our adventures that night. They showed me parts of myself I didn’t know, and the risk was worth the reward. Likewise, you are worth risking confrontations with your inner critic to gain the benefits of transforming yourself through the safe spaces of journaling and reading.

    * * *

    I am doing a 31-day series on reading and journaling as self care for educators. Each day of the series has bonus journal prompts. Click to join the LELA House family of educators committed to nourishing their reading, writing, and creative souls. You’ll receive a link to the journal prompts and gain early access to upcoming LELA House ideas, courses, and products. You only need to subscribe once. I will add a new worksheet each day to the access link.


    Roshaunda D. Cade, Ph.D. is an educator, writer, and creator.  She lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband and teenage children and enjoys reading, writing, dancing, and pushing her creative boundaries.  You can follow her at roshaundacade.com, lela-house.com, and on Teachable, Medium, Youtube, Pinterest, and Instagram.