Teaching Writer/Writing Teacher: Benefits and Losses

Professionalism is the enemy of creativity and invention ~ Leonard Cohen

            Bob Dylan slept on floors, couches, benches—other people’s floors, couches, benches.  His hair was a weedy meadow he pomaded with ouzo. Showers were what fell on him during rainy, un-umbrella-ed walks.  He peed out windows. He betrayed. He forgot. He stole. He presumed. He played. He sang. He created.  He is the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.  He didn’t pick up the award and he didn’t deliver the scheduled acceptance speech.  We have his songs and his legacy.  He is a reminder.

            Toward the other end of the spectrum (cf. diagnostic term), I have spent over thirty years behaving as teacher.  But, as my lapel button sports, “Well behaved women rarely make history.”  And yes, the benefits and joys of teaching include choosing literature I want to read—we do learn by teaching, freeing up students from school abuses they had sustained—and life-long friendships with students and colleagues.  Although an immigrant child raised in poverty, I acquired a three-acre property with a thirteen-room house; a pension and long-term care package; bucks for massages, yoga camps, jaunts through Budapest and London. 

One of the main curses of teaching in an institution is the bureaucratization of the creative process, orchestrated by those-who-ca(wo)n’t-teach-or-write administrators.  I exploited my writing talents to produce textbooks; taught too many courses under increasingly tyrannical strictures; wrote grant applications for time to write (although no one issues contracts for poetry books); tailored my writing projects to be granted time to write; committed (cf. incarceration) myself to draconian disciplines to “get some writing done,” despite; submitted (hm) my work to faceless, distant editors judging contests (the university would “get” awards). But The Muse doesn’t come in little uniform drawers, like ancient library card catalogs—ideas dutifully ranked alphabetically and secured by unforgiving rods running through them.  No self-respecting right brain will court a slapdown-happy opportunistic left-braining. I would be amazed at the risks and innovations of the Writing Poetry students I coached, secretly wondering when will I get to mine?

The body doesn’t lie.  Mine was trying to head me off with multiple embodiments of my self-abuse: multiple hand injuries from years of banging away at the keyboard to get get-it-over-with tasks over with so I could write poetry, music, whatever comes from authenticity instead of ambition, the internal instead of the external—whatever else dedicated writers have for their sacrifices of all of the above.  Back injuries, fibromyalgia, epic insomnia from the commutes and stress.  Yoyoing weight.  Premature gray.

            Juggling writing and teaching is like juggling work and child-care.  Someone has to suffer. And juggling, while focusing, is also limiting.  I decided to leave teaching, which I inordinately love, while there’s still time to discover who I am and can be as a writer. The final blow was when my university foisted course conversions on us which required lesson plans for every fifteen minutes to be planned months ahead of classes; and grading students on every peep they said or wrote.  As often happens, our tools became our masters. The faculty were enslaved to their digital tools.  Assessment instead of education. Micromanagement instead of music and magic. I refused to do that to my “Writing Poetry” and “Emily Dickinson” and “Shakespeare Survey” courses, among others.  I was not willing, in Dickinson’s words, to “Split the Lark” to find the music—either in my students or myself.  (That metaphor became moot at my university, as they abolished the music department.)

            Yes, my students benefitted from my being a writer—in both my writing and literature courses.  I know that who and how I am is more compelling to them than anything I say.  If I wasn’t taking care of myself, I did bring my passion for literature and the creative process to the classroom, as well as iconoclastic practices.  I forbade students to summarize and paraphrase, in favor of original and quirky interpretations.  I had them read as writers, questioning Shakespeare’s choices, challenging the gushings of bardolators. I eschewed the almighty writing prompt to unrelieve student writers of one of the most important aspects of writing—cultivating inspiration. I lied and finagled around assessment rubrics to protect us all. I submitted my syllabi, as I would throw a bloody bone to a cur, and then blithely closed the classroom door to create a space station for discovery and invention.

            You’re right, I wasn’t behaving.  But I was playing at it. I developed habits that are corrosive to a writer.  I studied, instead of read auto-didactically, in anticipation of engaging students. A nature walk was all about how I can arrange for them to have the experience. What I fed my mind as I attempted sleep were elaborate scripts with how to respond to administrative evils.  What awakened me in the morning was solutions to ephemeral, trivial problems instead of a new image for a poem. As I encouraged my students to discover inspiration in the daily and personal, I became a machine for identifying “that’s a poem” in our talks.  That carried over into my obsessively hoarding poem ideas—for when I got the time.  All it did was overwhelm and suffocate me.  Because I’m easily inspired and feared the tidal wave of ideas I had trained myself to identify for students, I developed my own addictions to stop the flow: stupid television, food, shopping—luckily, no drugs or alcohol.

Then there are the numbers—the numb-ers.  I love mathematics, so it’s not fear of numbers—but the misuse of them.  Institutional quantifications are all about control and dominance—and the numbing of the messy experience of being creative human beings.  During the COVID crisis, I’m taking my temperature and oxygen levels for peace of mind—that I don’t have it, or if I do to get immediate help and protect loved ones.  But human signs are more reliable—the cough, the loss of taste and smell, body aches, dizziness and other clinical symptoms. 

Numbers—how long, how much, how many did I write/publish—the only thing that administrators acknowledge—is counter to what Csikszentmihalyi terms “The Flow.”  Numbers are like putting multiple walls into a river—at some point, if we’re lucky, the river will break them down.  But the flood might be devastating and it will fling walls wildly.

Then there’s the issue of input.  A Columbia University study documented that the longer a writing teacher teaches—the more unconventional spellings she sees—the more her own spelling skills will deteriorate.  This applies, as well, to the myriads (that’s tens of thousands) of student drafts I read.  Yes, some were brilliant and thrilling, but how much better it would have been for me as a writer to read polished, accomplished writing.  Responding (I hate the words “marking” and “grading”) to student papers is for most teachers stultifying and onerous—one of main reasons teachers retire early.  Through the years, I have devised creative ways to maximize students’ learning and minimize my crumbling paper glaciers.  But what we practice is what we are.  I practiced feeding myself unpredictable food of varying temperatures on Styrofoam take-out trays.  Not always.  But mostly.  Practice cringing at incoming work, cringe you will at reading, in general.

The bureaucratization of the creative process, hoarding ideas, delaying projects, martineting myself to produce, studying instead of reading, numbing myself with numbers, denying myself nourishment and freedom—I betrayed my Muse.  I did develop a 60-page vita of publications and performances, but I abetted a culture of I can’t have for or take care of myself—and students learn by example.

I am delighted and gratified with my experience with students, but the greatest strengths of my work were in how I rebelled against the status quo, and writing my way into and through my iconoclastic ways.  That I loved to do.  And that’s what my students remember the most.

Who will I be?  How will I recover?  Write, of course.

           

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://writerswhocare.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/embracing-the-identity-of-teacher-writer/