About Teaching Writing. And Writing About Teaching.

Preamble: This is my final post to my last college writing class, marking the end of a sometimes haphazard career that started in 1979 at the University of Minnesota. As I recall and reread this, my adios to my Sp2016 Utah State University feature-writing students really was a little stream-on-consciousness. But “The Huddle” was our online class’s discussion, so the give-and-take — including the professor’s — was meant to be a little spontaneous. Spontaneity works better face-to-face than online, but I posted it, the students endured (or deleted) it, so I’ll stand by it.

TP

The Final Huddle

Apr 19 at 1:30pm

2 2 replies.

There is no formal Final Huddle assignment this week, but if you want, please do take this opportunity to put your own final -30- on this class.

Frankly, I would be the first to say that online is not the optimum way to do a feature-writing class. Of course, I also think that online is not the optimum way to teach *any* class, although it can work OK for some things. 

In writing classes, ironically, writing back and forth to each other is probably not as effective as you’d think. It is true, however, that — as in throwing kids into the pool as a swimming lesson — just giving writers good stuff to read can go a long way toward helping them develop their own writing. In some ways, there are no original thoughts left, just adaptation (or appropriation) of other people’s stuff. So reading John McPhee or E.B. White or whomever should be all it takes.

If that were true, however, then everything could be learned from The Google: Just do a search for thermodynamics and you’re a scientist. There are cases of people teaching themselves brain surgery and aviation construction that way, and they almost never end well. Although they do make good stories to tell. By that theory, I could simply have assigned you a bunch of books, the URL of Longreads.com and an extended Morgue file (the class stock of Great Writing), and you’d be great writers.

Truthfully, I’m not sure that anything I did here online over the past 15 weeks actually added much to the reading list. Ask any writer for advice on how to become a writer, and they’ll all pretty much say just, “Writewritewrite.” It’s the same for swimming or getting to Carnegie Hall: Paddle as hard as you can. 

I’m not sure that taking this class f2f instead of online would change that assessment much, although it would have been easier and more efficient to meet you in person and talk about writing, instead of writing about writing. How ironic is that? Being in the same room and having the in-person give-and-take on writing and sources and stories and strategies is more fun, anyway. Does it work better? Dunno.

Anyway, I have enjoyed our time together. As I said in the Final Opener, your job this week is simply to finish your profiles, and revise anything else you’d like another shot at. Everything is due for the grade on Friday, but I will be glad to work with you on any of your stuff after the semester is over.

This is my last USU class of any kind. 22 years at USU (and since 1979 overall), more than 100 JCOM classes and thousands of Aggies. That doesn’t make this class special in any way, except to me in its position in the arc of my teaching career. I’m not done, as you know: I’m still writing and editing, and likely will until the final -30-. But this *is* a milestone: I spent more than one-third of my life teaching at USU, which is a little weird to think about considering my intentions, hopes and dreams 22 years ago.

Still, it has been a good run, with plenty to look back on with pride, including this semester. You have been a pleasure to work with. Keep at it, and I fully expect that you will make it to Carnegie Hall, or wherever you’re going.

This will be the end-of-season WORD this year, but as my last writing students, you especially deserve a sneak peek:

 

“Why do we love our writing teachers so much? Why, years later, do we think of them with such gratitude? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously. They accept us as new members of the guild. They tolerate the under-wonderful stories we write, the dopy things we say, our shaky-legged aesthetic theories, our posturing, because they have been there themselves.

“We say: I think I might be a writer.

“They say: Good for you. Proceed.”

—George Saunders, writer, “My Writing Education: A Timeline,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2015 

Go forth, young writers.

Ted Pease

Professor of Interesting Stuff Emeritus 
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