Week 14 - First Semester

by Lucy S.

Next week is the last week of classes. I can hardly believe it. I'm different than I was at the beginning. I'm a teacher, or I'm becoming one. Teaching this class, reading their papers, working so hard on writing feedback - these have taught me more than I ever realized they would.

I tell my students to start with a passage from the text, type it out, then let their writing grow from that passage. Summarize at first. Define words. Seek connotations. Connect. Analyze. Read the passage and what you've written now. Think. Write some more. Talk about it with someone else. Write. Avoid abstractions and stock phrases and descriptions. Use concrete detail. Let your thesis emerge from this work, rather than trying to shove the text and your essay into a thesis-corset.

Teaching demands similar processes from me.  No pre-planned formula could teach me what I can only learn by actually teaching.

Four years ago at this time, I was finishing up my first semester back at my undergraduate university. I remember talking to my directed studies professor (who is now my friend) about graduate school. I said I'd go if I were younger, but it didn't seem possible at this point. He began explaining more about it.  I started to wonder if maybe it was possible after all.

People need ways to imagine themselves moving from one position to another. They need bridges. My friend built those bridges for me every time he explained something more about what had previously been a mystery to me. He helped (and helps) me travel on those bridges.  I want to do that for my students.


I've woven writings of people I know into this class where I think they fit. I used an excerpt from a 1994 article by the chair of our department (who has also become my friend) about one of the novels we read. Understanding it was a challenge for the students, but they grappled with it and got to read some literary theory. It expanded their understanding of the novel. I told them who the author was - his position at our own university. I smiled as I told them about him, told them how much the article had deepened that novel for me, later told them I'd just talked with him and shared his insight about what it is to have a moral response to literary art (the topic of his article).

This connects to one of our themes - the ways in which the authors we've read use their written word in the world. I want the students to see the realness of the authors doing this - to feel that they too could do this. I want them to see bridges from who they are now to a possible future 'them' as people whose writing moves out into the world.

I took them to the auditorium to see our visiting writer - a poet and professor from another university. We read some of her poems in class the Friday before that Monday. Some of the students went to other events where she spoke. One, an 18 year old accounting major, told me how thrilled he was to get to hear her speak and how much he loves poetry. I told him about Wallace Stevens, the great modernist poet who sold insurance to make a living.

I read them an excerpt from a book by a professor in our College of  Education. The author argues for the importance of democratic engagement in the class.  This may be one of the few public spaces in which students experience that kind of substantive democracy and begin to realize that they can actively participate and shape something they are a part of (beyond the more private realm).I told them this.

I referred a few times to a dissertation by my friend (the "bridge-builder") who wrote about representations of the corporation in American literature. This was when we read Animal's People, a novel set in a fictionalized Bhopal - a city in India where the worst industrial disaster EVER took place. I shared with them my friend's point about how you can't shoot a corporation (and the summarized scene from the novel from which he developed this point). I did this because the point was vital to our discussion of the "Kampani" in Sinha's novel, who left the city full of poison (Union Carbide, in real life). But I did it also because I wanted the students to FEEL over and over these connections between them, me, and others who write in the world.

A couple weeks ago, I had them read an essay published in Counter Punch that compared someone widely considered a hero for her fight for education for girls to a group of desperate immigrants trying to get into Italy by boat (without permission by that government to migrate there).  The first is celebrated - rightly so, the author pointed out. The latter - well, many died when their boat sank - and there was talk of fining the others for illegal immigration. We don't know the names of the others; they are simply represented to western readers as part of a mass. Why was their struggle for a better life not valorized? That was the author's question. He wrote of how the dominant western capitalist narrative would unravel if we called the would-be immigrants heroes. That author is another professor at our university - another friend of mine, and a former professor and advisor. He, too, came to our class one morning.  The students got to question him and dig deeper into his point as he expanded on it and conversed with us.  He shared some of his writing process, too. Thus, they encountered another person sharing his word in the world. (My use of that phrase itself is rooted in my experience in his class last fall, where he used it.)

Monday my dear friend Amir came to our class to read three of his poems with us. I made copies for everyone. He taught them some specific terminology - just enough to deepen their experience with poetry without overwhelming them. He got to analyze his own poems with them - such stunning poems - and they got to ask him questions about HOW he wrote them.  He talked to them about this process as well.  They realized again, at perhaps a deeper level, the value of imagery, of specific details. They realized that they too could try to write poetry. He told them that being a poet has changed the way he experiences life, the way he sees, the way he thinks. I think he made some of them fall in love with poetry. I know I was ready to write after that. I could feel how special that class meeting was even as we were living it.

Next we discuss a book about fast food union organizing called Wages So Low You'll Freak. Then the author will come to our class to talk about his experience and his writing process.

I am realizing that what I and those students and those texts and all the people who have contributed to that in so many ways - the people whose work I told them about or had them read - the people who taught me so much, including my kids, who gave me my first and longest lasting teaching experience and who continue to teach me - and so many good friends and family members who all have taught me and inspired me - I'm starting to realize that what WE have created in that class has transformed us. As the last classes unfold, I realize that we've somehow done something humane and moral and beautiful.  We've all done it.

Doing this didn't require that I feel confident going in or that I have no doubts or even anguish about it at times. It just required that we all persevere and try hard to bring one another along across these bridges.

I want to tell them on the last day what my friend told me in the fall of 2010. "Our efforts, if we allow ourselves to be true and if we acknowledge that our work is important, must be a constant struggle to stave off the disaster that is a democracy without art, without true literacy, without a full education. Lucy, keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. We – the collective we, the democratic we – need artists and thinkers like you. We need your Excellence."  I will print that up for them as the last handout, minus my name. I'll let them know that a teacher once wrote that to me.

I want every one of them to believe that about themselves. We need us all.