Here it comes.
Every time I walk into a room of new students I feel my life opens up a little like the aperture on a camera. Twenty or thirty new people to read with, to write with, to learn from and teach.
It is awesome.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
My students
I have become a professor in a Ct. college, left full time journalism behind for now. It feels like I jumped off as sinking ship. My colleagues in newspapers marvel at my timing. It wasn't really about timing. I had been wanting to teach full time, as my father did, for a long time when this opportunity arose. If was so funny the way it happened. One day I got this phone call. A man said hello, and identified himself as a dept. of writing chair, and asked if I would be interested in a one year appointment. We chatted a bit and later, I called him back and said I would like to do it. If only all life leaps could be so easy.
It is particularly interesting to me because I am writing a book about mid life leaps. Now I have made a mid life leap and I feel so much more understanding for the people I have written about, the risks they took and the anxiety/excitement involved. I have come to notice that many of the life leaps that are really right can seem effortless at first. This is an illusion. The hard parts creep in later on.
I have about 100 new students this semester. They sit in class and look so eager. Most of them are probably two decades younger than me. Sometimes I look at their fresh faces and wonder what life has in store of each of them.
They write about love, hope, fear and anger.
As the world feels like it is spinning out of control - financial markets melting down, planet heating up, all that stuff -- it is hard not to notice how different things are for them than they were when I was in college.
I found an essay I wrote when I was in high school about red tide, caused by excessive blooms of plankton. The research I did BACK THEN (1976?!) linked these blooms to warming seas. I remember the flutter of concern in my stomach as I contemplated the future of my planet. Just the idea that the planet itself could have problems was so worrying and scary. If it was scary to me then, what must it be like for these students now? My daughter is very aware, at ten, that we have not been good planet-occupants. She is mad about it. She yells at me when I get coffee in styrofoam cups or do not recycyle something. She is concerned about where all the garbage goes. She wrote a little essay about landfills. She wants to be a veterinarian. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer.
It is hard not to look at my students and project my daughter upon them. I think of them as daughters and sons of other people. They have nice smelling hair and good fashion sense. One young woman has dyed black hair and piercings. Another young woman brought me a box of muffins. Some of them smoke. I can smell it when they enter the classroom. But when I was in college I think MORE people smoked.
I will blog on here about their work and progress, my thoughts on teaching. The things I am learning about teaching and about ways to present knowldge and information.
I look out at their little seas of their faces and listen to their ideas and I feel this great huge responsibility to let them know the things they need, about writing on the word and sentence level but also at the level of message and style and ultimately about the possibility of working with words.
The JOB of writing.
That job has been very good to me, I have been able to find myriad ways to write for money and support my family, even when my husband was very sick.
A little back story: When I was young I moved to NYC from Albuquerque, NM, I met the only person I knew who was a writer, the cousin of a friend of mine, who worked for HG as a staff writer/editorial assistant. She looked over my clips from my hometown paper and college paer and told me, deadpan, that I WOULD NEVER BE A WRITER and to give it up. It would not happen. It was too hard and there was too much competition and I didn't have what it takes.
I believed her and went on to waitress for years and work at a television and radio museum. It wasn't until years later that someone I met told me I was a good writer and should pursue it as a career. I applied to Columbia and got a fellowship and got a degree in creative writing and then I went to work at The New York Times, the New York Post, magazines and a Gannett local paper as a columnist for ten years. I wrote books that won awards and books of poems. I wrote in different genres.
All those years I missed out on being a writer because one person told me to give it up.
One reason I wanted to teach was to tell all the would-be and wannabe and some talent and lots of talent young people that THEY CAN be writers, and that writing, even in these waning days of newspapers and the questionable days of book publishing, is a JOB. It can be a good job.
I want to pass on that little secret. There will always be a need (and market) for well crafted words. In fact, we need their words, these younger people. We need them to fix this planet, or at least take some responsibility for it, and words are a good place to start.
In my classes I encourage:
-outrage
-despair
-RANT
-humor/sarcasm
-absolute delight, whenever possible
In my classes I will not tolerate:
-disrespect for me or classmates by talking to one another during class discussions/lectures
-plagiarism of any kind, including IDEA plagiarism
-lame excuses
I bring to the table a lot of real investment in mystudents work, and I expect them to invest equally on their end, too.
Write and write with heart. Write with presence. Write with your whole brain trained on the writing. If my students do that - they will succeed not just in my class but as writers in the world.
It is particularly interesting to me because I am writing a book about mid life leaps. Now I have made a mid life leap and I feel so much more understanding for the people I have written about, the risks they took and the anxiety/excitement involved. I have come to notice that many of the life leaps that are really right can seem effortless at first. This is an illusion. The hard parts creep in later on.
I have about 100 new students this semester. They sit in class and look so eager. Most of them are probably two decades younger than me. Sometimes I look at their fresh faces and wonder what life has in store of each of them.
They write about love, hope, fear and anger.
As the world feels like it is spinning out of control - financial markets melting down, planet heating up, all that stuff -- it is hard not to notice how different things are for them than they were when I was in college.
I found an essay I wrote when I was in high school about red tide, caused by excessive blooms of plankton. The research I did BACK THEN (1976?!) linked these blooms to warming seas. I remember the flutter of concern in my stomach as I contemplated the future of my planet. Just the idea that the planet itself could have problems was so worrying and scary. If it was scary to me then, what must it be like for these students now? My daughter is very aware, at ten, that we have not been good planet-occupants. She is mad about it. She yells at me when I get coffee in styrofoam cups or do not recycyle something. She is concerned about where all the garbage goes. She wrote a little essay about landfills. She wants to be a veterinarian. When I was ten I wanted to be a writer.
It is hard not to look at my students and project my daughter upon them. I think of them as daughters and sons of other people. They have nice smelling hair and good fashion sense. One young woman has dyed black hair and piercings. Another young woman brought me a box of muffins. Some of them smoke. I can smell it when they enter the classroom. But when I was in college I think MORE people smoked.
I will blog on here about their work and progress, my thoughts on teaching. The things I am learning about teaching and about ways to present knowldge and information.
I look out at their little seas of their faces and listen to their ideas and I feel this great huge responsibility to let them know the things they need, about writing on the word and sentence level but also at the level of message and style and ultimately about the possibility of working with words.
The JOB of writing.
That job has been very good to me, I have been able to find myriad ways to write for money and support my family, even when my husband was very sick.
A little back story: When I was young I moved to NYC from Albuquerque, NM, I met the only person I knew who was a writer, the cousin of a friend of mine, who worked for HG as a staff writer/editorial assistant. She looked over my clips from my hometown paper and college paer and told me, deadpan, that I WOULD NEVER BE A WRITER and to give it up. It would not happen. It was too hard and there was too much competition and I didn't have what it takes.
I believed her and went on to waitress for years and work at a television and radio museum. It wasn't until years later that someone I met told me I was a good writer and should pursue it as a career. I applied to Columbia and got a fellowship and got a degree in creative writing and then I went to work at The New York Times, the New York Post, magazines and a Gannett local paper as a columnist for ten years. I wrote books that won awards and books of poems. I wrote in different genres.
All those years I missed out on being a writer because one person told me to give it up.
One reason I wanted to teach was to tell all the would-be and wannabe and some talent and lots of talent young people that THEY CAN be writers, and that writing, even in these waning days of newspapers and the questionable days of book publishing, is a JOB. It can be a good job.
I want to pass on that little secret. There will always be a need (and market) for well crafted words. In fact, we need their words, these younger people. We need them to fix this planet, or at least take some responsibility for it, and words are a good place to start.
In my classes I encourage:
-outrage
-despair
-RANT
-humor/sarcasm
-absolute delight, whenever possible
In my classes I will not tolerate:
-disrespect for me or classmates by talking to one another during class discussions/lectures
-plagiarism of any kind, including IDEA plagiarism
-lame excuses
I bring to the table a lot of real investment in mystudents work, and I expect them to invest equally on their end, too.
Write and write with heart. Write with presence. Write with your whole brain trained on the writing. If my students do that - they will succeed not just in my class but as writers in the world.
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