A Living Time-Capsule: Reading Response 2

In perusing over my recent readings for a topic to discuss in this second reading response, I picked up on something that I hadn't realized before. That is, that one of the professors interviewed in the piece from _Colors of a Different Horse_ titled "Life in the Trenches: Prospectives from Five Writing Programs" is one which I am familiar with from my undergrad experience. Though this person taught fiction and I was in the poetry program, the creative writing group at Cal Poly is very small, and thus we were all pretty familiar with one another. The fact that this professor participated in this interview when they were in an MFA program and working as a T.A. and now is a rather well received author and associate professor, made me even more intrigued to see how his teaching style may have changed over the years. I will also use some of these changes to think in terms of how I will differ from now to years into my teaching, and see what interesting conclusions can be reached therein.

The first interview question asks how these busy graduate students and teachers find the time to do their writing. This seems to be a universal question within MFA programs given that my colleagues often talk of how much more they had written before entering a program. Professor T, we shall call him, answers this question rather beautifully. Saying that while Malamud would put his writing before his students, that he himself is unable to. He says it is easier to lose a day of writing than to disappoint a student, but that he is lucky to only be teaching one class because it allows him to focus on writing as well.

The idea of the student coming before the teacher raises a very interesting question. How much of your personal life should you push aside in order to dedicate more of yourself to a student? In this instance, professor T seems ready and willing to drop free-time to support the students, but did this ideal last? I can say from my experiences that Professor T may have lost this initial spark of kindness for the students. Given the fact that my friend was almost in tears because professor T's Facebook once said that some of the work that his students wrote was so bad that if he had a gun he would use it, I think it wore off slightly. Finding a balance between work and life seems to be the only way to avoid becoming that burned out professor who just doesn't seem to care.

In response to the second question asking how to maintain a good balance between teaching and writing, professor T starts to resemble more closely the person I know today. He admits he would rather blow the students off to write, but that "academic vanity" gets in his way. For him, this term means that his desire for students to respect him, respect the class, and leave as better writers is what leads him to spend so much time on preparation and hand-outs. This again speaks to how difficult it can be to find that balance between identities as person, writer, and teacher.

In response to whether his MFA program was helping him become a better teacher, his response was no. His particular workshop did not emphasis craft at all, and he felt having more discussions on craft would help him to better his teaching style instead of just his writing. That made me wonder if my MFA colleagues felt that any other classes, besides this one of course, would help them to be better teachers? Since workshops tend to be one in the same, as we saw from our discussions and mock attempt at one, I tend to feel that the only way they could help with teaching would be to see what works and what does not within the workshop and then try to fix these issues later as a teacher.

The next question was very fascinating to me in that instead of looking at how teaching might interfere with ones writing, this question was how has teaching given them a new perspective for their writing. professor T had a good response, he felt that the act of teaching markedly improved his writing because he had to better understand the elements of writing to explain them to others. I have often heard that the best way to learn a material is to teach it, to learn to remove it from the scary academic realm and translate it into terms understandable by the student. This brings me back to a question asked many times in class, if so many people do not buy into the workshop process, then why is it done time and time again? Is it a lack of a better replacement or is it that the workshop itself is fine but it is just the bruised egos of writers past who can't forget the bad days? Interesting question indeed.

In English graduate programs there always seems to exist a rather oppositional stance between creative and analytic writing. Our reading from last week brought up some of these stresses, that MA students should by the ones to read and analyze literature and that the MFA students should be the ones who write it. Along these terms, the interviewers next question asked the professors if they believed their program either perceives or encourages this dichotomy between the teaching of expository writing and creative writing. Professor T felt that though he appreciates a connection between creative and expository writing, that the school in generally liked to keep them apart. he feels that though the two styles have completely different aims, you can better learn and understand one form by looking at the other. Creative writing may help bolster the imaginative capabilities of the analytic writer while the creative writer can better learn to express themselves through an understanding of grammar and form.

So, considering that as beginning teachers we will most likely start with expository classes, will you add any aspects of creative writing into the mix in addition to expository writing? In my answer, I say ideally yes. I think things like free writes that can be applied to both creative and expository writing are essential to teach to students. The notion that to free your mind can be a good thing as it lets you come to ideas you had not seen before.

I found professor T's last answer to be the most comforting. While the question asks what is the most significant reward right now in his life, one of his answers was the hope of landing a teaching job at a college in the future. In addition to the notion of gaining confidence as a writer and as a person, it is rewarding for him to think that this growth will help him to land a job. And seeing as I know him to be a professor today in a beautiful town and campus, I suppose his rewards paid off.

This was a super fascinating exercise to do because I felt I was reading a man's time capsule. It seems that these were not only his thoughts and ideas, but it seems to echo the doubts and emotions of both MFA and MA students alike. We are all here to do better, to make connections, to find a bit of ourselves and then hopefully find success in continuing to do this for the rest of our lives. Though Professor T may have lost some of his glitter-eyed ideas of his youth, he is still doing what he loves and trying to pass it on to younger generations... something I can only wish to accomplish myself.