Spotlight Writer-Diana Weis

Diana Weis

Millard Public Schools in Omaha, NE

Teaching Experience:Diana photo

  • 3-6 ESL teacher at Morton Elementary in Lexington, NE - 1994-1996
  • ESL teacher, Millard Public Schools in Omaha, NE - 1997-2004
  • 5th grade teacher, Millard Public Schools in Omaha, NE -  2004 - current

  • Personal Experience

  • I took a recorded linguistics class a few years ago and one line has stuck with me since: There is an infinite number of ways for a sentence to be formed. I don’t think I had ever consciously thought about the options for combining nouns, verbs, adjective etc. to make a single sentence, but I know my younger self knew it innately because she was petrified of writing, more exactly of not knowing if the right words would come.

  • NeWP Experience

  • While finishing up my Master’s Degree, I marveled at how effortlessly the teacher sitting next to me seemed to whip out her reflection papers.  When I asked her how she did it, she simply told me that it was due to the Nebraska Writing Project, and if I wanted to learn how to be comfortable writing, that was the place I needed to go.  So I did.
  • Pen in hand ready to take notes and learn about this thing called writing, I signed up for the Lincoln Summer Institute in 2004.  Then came back as a participant in the Literature Institute (2005) and the Technology Institute (2008).  Each time becoming more comfortable with the process and instruction of writing, but it wasn’t done through a series of lectures or definitions.  It was done by giving me an open invitation to practice and share the writing I wanted to do with enthusiastic educators.
  • Henri Nouwen best describes what I continually learn and gain with my involvement with NeWP when he says:
  • Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us.  The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.  To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.  Thus, writing requires a real act of trust.  We have to say to ourselves; “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.”
  • –Nouwen, Seeds of Hope


    Additional NeWP Experience

  • Tech Level II  Fall 2008
  • Technology Institute Co-facilitator 2009
  • Summer Writing Institute  Co-facilitator 2010 & 2011
  • Board Member  2008 - current
  • Tech Manager   2008 - current

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