Teaching Writing

I am teaching writing right now. Yes, right now. I’m in a classroom at the University of Iowa (go Hawks) teaching a course about teaching writing.

“But Sam,” you might be thinking to yourself, “how can you be teaching a class and writing this blog at the same time?”

Magic.

Just kidding, there isn’t anything magical about what is happening right now. Although maybe there is.

Students are scattered around the room working on a collaborative writing assignment. I’m sitting with them. Waiting for them to finish. I pulled out my laptop to do some writing myself. Modeling writing. Joining in with them. Doing what I’ve done so many times in my twenty years as an educator.

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I’ve done a lot of writing during my teaching. Portions of my dissertation. Papers for graduate classes. My book about my friend Nick. My book about my mom. Some of Shot Across the River Styx and Determined Weeds were written in 11th grade composition courses. I wrote while the students wrote.

Now, before you accuse me of being a bad teacher, know that what I’m describing isn’t as though I was trying to get out of work. In fact, it was important to me to create disciplined spaces where students participated in sustained, thoughtful writing during school. I found that a teacher interrupting the writing process often got in the way of students. Whether it was students coming to me to seek validation for what they were working on or me peeking over their shoulder with advice, the evaluative eye can deaden the vitality that is necessary for writing and thinking to happen. It isn’t that I didn’t provide feedback. I conferenced with students, gave them notes on drafts, and graded their work. Still, there were days in class devoted to building sacred spaces where people wrote without interruption. And I modeled that writing by doing it alongside my students.

I’d play quiet music in the background. Kaki King, Jose Gonzalez, something soft to set the mood. I joked and told the students I needed hippy music to write with them. To blot out school. I did. I still doo. I’m listening to Junip as I write this blog. Anyway, the music cast a spell, I’d set a time that we were writing to, and then we’d write together. Those were some of my favorite days in school. How luxurious it is to step away from screens, from phones, and from what my friend the Professor Anne Whitney might call the schoolishness of school and enter into writing.

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Students are spread around the room right now. Some of them have gone outside to the lobby to work. They have until the end of class to create a collaborative piece of writing. Some are quietly typing at their computers. Others are talking through what they’re making. It’s a writing test, so I’m seeing what they create within the rules I’ve given them. They are struggling because writing is hard. Their minds alight with thought. Again, I can think of few more valuable things to do in school.

This is the first time I’m teaching this class about teaching writing. It takes me back in time to do so. Much of my life has been devoted to teaching about writing.

In my novel The Person on the Other Side of This Book, I created a fictional version of myself who was teaching a course about writing. How prophetic. I was not an associate professor of English Education when I wrote that book. I am now. I wasn’t in my mid-forties when I wrote that book. I am now. There are some prophecies from that book I’d like to come true. I’d like to be okay. I’d like to make peace with the anxiety that comes from being a fragile human being in an enormous, complicated universe. A peace that surpasses all human understanding. Jesus, that would be nice. I’d like to avoid all the health scares and apocalyptic desolation I wrote about in that book. We’ll see.

What I do know is this: I’m living through an uncomfortable moment. Lots of emotional stuff is expressing itself in me in ways that are hard for me to handle. Lots of pressures are working on me. At forty-four, I’m reckoning with what I am, what I’ve been, and what I’m becoming. The move to Iowa, the stress of this new job, and all sorts of other forces have converged on me. I’m experiencing the world in a way that is hard right now. And yet I know I’m experiencing what I need to experience. And it will be good. Light at the end of the tunnel, I suppose, even if I can’t quite see it yet. I can kind of see it.

Writing has always been a part of the way I move through things. So here I am. Typing away. And I know that it is good to be typing away. Making sense (and peace) with an enormous, complicated universe with my students.

What a good thing to do.