Writing teacher writing

In the past few months, as I've been trying to figure out how to carve out more time for my own writing,  relevant articles and passages have been dropping from the sky. First someone slipped into my mailbox a NISOD Innovation Abstracts sheet, Stephen A. Catrello's "Practicing What You Teach". He recounts, when he was an adjunct, bringing in samples from his technical editing "real job," both to show his students real-world writing and to let them see him as a fellow writer. Later, when he landed his full-time gig, he wrote the narrative essay assignment along with his students, emphasizing the value of their seeing his process and his struggles (and successes presumably).

I often have thought about doing assignments along with my students, but hadn't  found the time until this semester (although I do generally talk about how I'd approach the assignment and toss out some of my conceptual-art-essays).

Warning: digression ahead. Which makes me think about the essay-of-the-mind (to echo Wallace Stevens' "On Modern Poetry"). I'm not sure whether it's an occupational hazard or my natural habits of procrastination (probably both), but I find myself with a sizable collection of ghost-essays, germs of ideas floating around in my head or at most scribbled onto some back-of-an-envelope to-write list , but not yet fleshed out into actual words. It's a dangerous practice, I'm afraid, for several reasons.

• It's too easy for the concepts in my mind to seem clever, insightful, poignant so that it's with stomach-churning disappointment that I see them lying there lifeless when finally captured on paper. Hypothesis: the longer the ghost-essays wander around my head before venturing out to test the air the more painful the disillusionment. Learning to tolerate this pain is (one) key to overcoming writers' block, which is a serious problem for so many of my students. The idea, of course, is to convince them that Revision will come riding to the rescue on that cliched White Horse.
• The other important thing, for me to remember and for students to understand, is that in the process of putting down these ideas on paper brings up more ideas. As the mathematicians say, this is a nontrivial statement.

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The second thing I stumbled across, from one of the lyrical introductions in John D'Agata's The Next American Essay (317):

Indeed, the essay's innate intoxication with the mathematics of language--the multiplication of data, evidence, argument--distinguishes the genre as much as it taboos it. Its occasional focus on the list as a formal device, for example, eschews the comforting narratives of fiction, the intimate lyricism of poetry, and the sensational admissions of memoir, allowing its writers to make art out of the gossip and noise and rubble and minutia that often gets overlooked in literature, fashioning instead a baudy, relentless, user-unfriendly art that is not comforting, not intimate, not sensationalist at all, but suspicious, messy, and stubbornly unresolved.

Now, in the context of teaching FYC, this made me laugh out loud. His view of the essay is so contrary to the controlled, thesis-driven artifact that seems to be held up by most instructors as model (though, in truth, few of the "model" essays commonly used in FYC fit that paradigm either).  I've written about this tension before, but what struck me reading this particular quote was the tension between my own aims as a writer and the objectives I foist upon my students, which slide (maybe?) too often towards the formulaic.

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I also happened upon a couple articles from my NCTE journals that made me think about myself as teacher vs. writer, about to what extent the two roles complement or conflict with each other. According to its abstract Laurel Santini's article "The Waiting Self," in the Dec. 2007 issue of TETYC, "explores the conflict between teaching writing and one's own writing practice." Santini writes that although/because she is consumed by the creative act of teaching, it's difficult for her to find the time and energy to work at her own writing. (It's interesting to me that Jeff Sommers finds it necessary in his editorial to defend his choice to  publish such a personal memoir.) She acknowledges the resentment that creates: "I've regularly said, 'I'm just a teacher. I will never be anything more.' I say it with deep anger, stirring up a pot of sloppy joe at my stove" (129). She ends on a note that is hopeful but poignant:

I get angry with myself when after work, dinner, and dishes, I cannot get inside the essays and stories I've started. But every now and again, my mind prunes those school thoughts that overcrowd. Some intuitive gardener awakens to clear a path to my deepest self. Then, a generous spaciousness opens up: the mess of bills, keys, books, and shoes in the entry seem suddenly cozy rather than cluttered. The night promises rest no matter when I get to bed, and I am able to write. I find the self that has been waiting.

Her comparison, earlier in the essay, to motherhood, the "warnings since I was young that one day a woman's life may not be her own" (127), also resonate powerfully for me and the difficulty of finding the proverbial "room of one's own." I'm not quite sure, for me, how those roles of teacher and mother compare, but with my daughters now at 16, 17, and 20 years old, I can almost smell the tantalizing air of freedom.   

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Finally, from the Jan. 2008 College English, comes Bruce Ballenger's "Reconsiderations: Donald Murray and the Pedagogy of Surprise." (For my own reconsideration of Murray's influence, see this earlier post; the homage in this post title is intentional.) With this article I shift from bemoaning how teaching can interfere with my own writing to believing how important it is that writing teachers actually write, that the teaching and writing should be companionable practices. (In my more cynical moments, I wonder how often this is the case, esp. for comp teachers with a 5/5 course load as at my community college.) Ballenger writes about how Murray's influence was marginalized as comp/rhet developed as a discipline: "Don's belief, back then, that there was a 'black hole in the center' of the discipline reflected his concern that research and theory were leading scholars away from looking closely at what writers do when they compose" (297). Though he writes that "perhaps this isn't such a bad thing," Ballenger does offer a nice defense of Murray's method of inquiry:

the power of his method may transcend Murray and be located in the personal essay itself and, especially, in what the genre demands of writers--to be carried on their shoulders through busy crossroads of thought, dodging and weaving through a swarm of voices, entertaining both wonder and doubt. While the slender "I" may be a narrow gap to look through, the essay rides on the assumption that there is much for us to learn from the peculiarities of one writer's experience. (301)

Amen. That socially constructed knowledge seems to have supplanted this more personal brand of inquiry saddens and disturbs me. But let me finish on a brighter note, one that connects with my earlier point about discovery through writing; here Ballenger quotes from one of Murray's unpublished essays, with the evocative title "Importance of Making Snow":

The writer within is always a stranger, with a grin, a top hat and long, quick fingers which produce what was not there a moment before. I sall never know this magic man well, although he has been within me for sixty years. He entices me with is capacity to surprise. We've been a pretty good team, all told, the surpriser and the surprised.

Comments

[joanna]

As always, a perceptive and thoughtful essay. I find that during the semester, I blog and record bits of writing that I bring to revising in the summer--it's a rhythm that I've grown into--write poetry in the spring, revise in the summer--and some projects are large and I've made my peace with the fact that they aren't going to be ground out in a semester. What I like about being a cc prof is that I can create and follow my writing projects--there's no pressure to publish.