Teaching: the job that successful writers love to hate

Twenty years ago, during my brief career as a high school teacher, my first job ever was also my best. After my year of student teaching and the successful attainment of my certificate, I got a job teaching summer school to high schoolers at a school just eight blocks from my house. (In this picture, the school is in the background on the left, with the red roof and ornate tower.) I had one day to prepare, and I spent it cleaning and rearranging the classroom until I felt at home; then at the end of that day I went down into the basement book depository, where I came up with a freshman lit anthology and a little hardback grammar. I figured I would go from one to the other, and that's what I did. The two-hour-long summer school classes were perfectly timed to learn composition. You could deliver a grammar lecture, have the students read a short story, discuss it, and have them write a short theme, all in two hours. In the afternoon I graded the papers. And the students progressed. They did great, and they loved the class. I felt like a genius.

I hasten to add that when the summer was over and I was thrown into the real world of five classes a day in high school, things weren't nearly so ideal. But I still look back fondly on that summer of 1985 as one of the best times of my life.

That was before I had figured out anything about writing fiction, before I edited a magazine, before I published my own books. Since then, I have never gotten an MFA, and I have never taught creative writing. I've only been to one writers workshop, and I'm going to another in 6 weeks.

So I don't have much exposure to the world of creative writing programs, the ones that teachers and published novelists and poets and everyone badmouth and say how horrible they are. You know the lament: the students are barely literate, they have false hopes, they have been raised with endless praise and expect the same for their poor efforts, they have an unrealistic idea of what it means to be a writer, they are infected with writers workshop-speak, and above all, they have no talent.

Joining this chorus, in the July Harpers (so new they don't even have the cover up on their website yet), is novelist Lynn Freed. She runs it down, from the graceless students to the faculty memos to the fear that teaching is detracting from her own writing. She scorns her students' work, their dress, their informality. For page after page she goes on about how soul-destroying the whole enterprise is -- for her. By her count, she labors for ten years before she sees one good story.

And then, in the middle of the piece, I found the key:

When, as an adult, I found in a Japanese piano teacher a woman of fierce and uncompromising standards, I felt immediately at home. ... I was taking the lessons because I loved to play, because I wanted to play better, and because a weekly lesson with a master of the instrument forced me not only to practice regularly but also to play in a way that would make her less likely to push me off a cliff.

For fuck's sake -- she's a bottom! She wants only to do well for fierce, uncompromising teacher who might, if she has not practiced her lessons assiduously enough, kill her. Toiling under this strict disciplinarian gives her life meaning. Of course she doesn't like teaching. She can take it, but she can't dish it out.

Watching a Giants game a few years ago, I heard one of the announcers make a remark about an umpire who was showing such little enthusiasm for his task that you could barely tell whether he had called a pitch a ball or a strike. After several innings of trying to distinguish the umpire's calls, announcer Duane Kuiper blurted, "You know, if you don't like your job, quit and do something else!" That was exactly my reaction after reading Freed's article.

Update: another blogger comments on the piece.

Lynn Freed, Duane Kuiper,Creative Writing, MFA, Harpers