Toward a More Generous Pedagogy

I don’t remember what made me pull the fat hardcover off my poetry shelf one day not long ago. It was one I had picked up secondhand on the Upper West Side in my grad school days, with a green linen cover, a bit stained: the complete poems of Robert Frost. On the front in gold was a facsimile of his signature, which slanted neither forward nor back but asserted itself in a way I’d never managed with my own.

When I opened it an unfamiliar clump of folded pages held together with a rusty paperclip fell out. I realized it was a paper I’d written when I was getting my MFA in nonfiction. I took an elective with a famous Russian poet who loved Frost and Thomas Hardy, and each week we had to memorize a poem by one or the other. All these decades later, snippets rise to the surface of my mind now and again, and I’m grateful for this part of the experience. Frost’s Snow falling and night falling fast oh fast. Hardy’s In a solitude of the sea, deep from human vanity, stilly crouches she.

But the Frost poem that I had chosen to analyze for this forgotten paper? All that came back was a fuzzy image of a woman in a field in the poem, and a bad feeling in my gut. Soon the memory trickled in. That was the semester I was newly in love with the man I later married, and I had other things on my mind. Also this: I had expunged the memory because it brought me shame. I turned to the paper’s last page and sure enough: a dense block of red scrawl followed by the kind of grade I didn’t usually get in literature classes: C+.

I braced myself and read the poem and the paper. The famous poet was right. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was grasping at straws, which is funny because the poem is called “The Exposed Nest” and it’s actually about grasping straw. I didn’t have much experience with poetry then, and it’s obvious to me now that I misunderstood the spirit of the gentle poem, willing it to have a juicy conflict that just wasn’t there.

I braced myself to decipher the Russian poet’s back-slanted comments. He called one of my arguments silly. He went on: “Don’t press it.” “Wrong.” “Not really.” “You are overdoing it a little.” And the kicker: “brother!” At some point his red marker ran out and he switched to a fatter one. His notes travel the entire periphery of one page, running upside down across the bottom. Decades had passed, but I felt my face turn red.

I have a pretty good idea where this quick default to shame originates in me—not just inborn temperament and habit, but a self-effacing reaction to the patriarchal air we all breathe, particularly  women born into the male-bravado fest of the mid-20^th century. Many of us writers, no matter our gender, turned to the written word in the first place because we felt shushed somewhere along the way by voices louder, and deeper, than our own. Because writing well requires a long apprenticeship with a lot of failure and rejection along the way, those of us who are most serious about the work are prone to being hard on ourselves. And the subset of us who write fiction automatically imagine our way into the viewpoints of others, to the extent we can have trouble staying grounded in our own.

Reading my Frost paper 40 years later, a voice inside me says the Russian poet had every right to slap me down, because I was in an Ivy League program but I had not turned in Ivy League work. It says he did me a kindness by not flunking me. I had no business wasting the famous man’s precious time. It was my own failing that he never bothered getting to know me.

On the voice drones. Who are you to judge the teaching style of a man who survived the gulag and won the Nobel Prize? The world is a hard place. Sometimes writers need a push to get to their best work, the kind that grabs you by the balls. Speaking of which, when are you going to grow a pair?

It’s only after this internalized bully runs through his tedious repertoire that I—published novelist, poet and columnist, winner of multiple writing awards—claw back my power and agency. I tune in to the tone of the poet’s comments: gratuitous, sarcastic, verging on cruel. What did he hope to accomplish, using his considerable power merely to knock me down? Why would a teacher ever speak to a student this way?

I am not just a writer but a writing teacher. I have been a writing teacher for a very long time, and I have amassed experience, skill and a following. In 2017, after more than two decades teaching fiction and poetry online at The Writers Studio, I created the school’s first memoir class. I found it so rewarding that I now teach three levels of memoir.

Students come into my intro class off the street, so to speak: all they have to do is register and pay for the six-week class. This means I get people with MFAs and publications alongside people who’ve never taken a writing class and even people who haven’t written a word as adults. I meet them all wherever they are. Over the course of each term, I make sure I get to know them well. They improve, every last one. The majority stick around and move up the levels. My advanced students are deep into their book manuscripts, a dedicated core group writing at a professional level.

What is the successful pedagogy I’ve tested and refined over the years? It’s so basic as to seem self-evident: If you treat students with respect, kindness, generosity, patience and curiosity, they will learn quickly. Set expectations high without sacrificing the other attributes, and students will meet and then exceed them, as long as they’re not using up all their writing energy warding off the same forces that have hurt them outside the classroom: subtle power plays, dismissiveness and, to borrow a term that has gained traction in psychology, unhealthy boundaries.

I can’t remember the last time I had a difficult student. Sometimes I think this is just a good run of luck, but sometimes I let myself take credit, because I don’t give students a reason to test me or grow defensive. Think of the folly of trying to shame students into being more vulnerable on the page when shame is already the invisible force making it hard for them to do so. If, instead, you create an atmosphere that feels comfortable and safe, your students will trust each other and willingly dig deep on their own. The second part of your job is to offer them some useful narrative tools, which they will pick up and play with like eager kids until they grow proficient. They will do this work with relief and gratitude and joy, particularly if their personal story is weighed down by trauma and loss and abuse.

Some other basics that seem glaringly obvious to me, but are still worth stating: know and love your subject, make your lessons clear, come prepared with examples and simple analogies to break down difficult concepts. Never play favorites. No matter what’s going on in your own life, keep your ego and mood out of the classroom. Listen to whatever your students are trying to tell you indirectly when they’re not at their best on the page; chances are they’ve bumped up against something that frightens them and they don’t yet have enough craft to master the fear. Remind them that writing is cyclical;  breakthroughs come after impasses.

Back in my MFA program, one week I brought an early attempt at fiction to my nonfiction workshop, something others had done (in those days before memoir became hot, fiction students were welcomed into our tiny nonfiction workshop, but the arrangement was not reciprocal because the fiction workshops were already large). My professor could have said that short stories demand a different set of tools from nonfiction, and that fiction was not his expertise. He could have said, if you’re serious about writing fiction, why don’t you find a good fiction class, or start teaching yourself by reading Forster and Gardner? What he actually said, flatly, was that I had no aptitude for fiction.

How easy it is to judge a student solely based on what that student has done so far. How much more demanding—and satisfying—to make like a teacher and teach. We teachers are vested with tremendous power, and we should wield that power with modesty and care and wonder.

Maybe it’s true (as that voice inside me keeps saying) that my pedagogy is little but warmed-over golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But then I remember that the voice is just patriarchy sneering in my ear. I rise up on my own terms, in my own meek voice and say I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I even know more than you, for all your bluster.