To celebrate the Simon & Schuster re-release of Adequate Yearly Progress, I pulled together some themes I’ve been thinking and speaking about for years as a 5-part series for the Washington Post.

Each of these, in its own way, relates to the stories we tell about teaching.

Has anyone told you yet that the first year of teaching will make you or break you? People love repeating this sound bite. It rhymes, it’s clever-and, it’s absolutely terrifying.

Luckily, it’s also not that true. A truer—and more useful—statement is this: Almost all new teachers have days when they think they are being broken.

When teaching is good, it’s really good. But when teaching is hard, it’s really hard.

One piece of common writing advice is to read your writing out loud to see how it sounds. For me, a more helpful way to get a sense of the “sound” of a piece of writing is to spend a few minutes listening to an audiobook that’s both well written AND has an amazing narrator. If you listen long enough, the narrator’s voice becomes the voice in your head when you sit down to reread your own writing. Suddenly, unnecessary words or unclear phrasing become obvious, and you hear the poetic potential in lines that felt straightforward when you wrote them. Plus, the well-honed style of a professional voice-actor offers a less jarring version of your work than your own voice in an empty room. While writing and revising Adequate Yearly Progress, this habit became so invaluable that I repeatedly listened to specific sections of certain books depending on which part of my own book I was working on – kind of an audio-chapter playlist.

It’s a well-known, well-worn word of writing-world advice—almost a cliche at this point: The best writers are readers.

This is true, of course. Without more context, though, it’s not specific enough to be useful. A decade of teaching high school English taught me a more workable version of this.