CWP workshops always provide time for teachers to write. Just like their students, teachers become part of a writer's
workshop -- a community of writers. They share their work and support each other as writers. This page offers
examples of writing by teachers completed during a CWP course.
On Brain-iacs and Voices
Erica J. Rewey
In high school, I was the teacher’s pet. Especially the English teacher’s
pet. No matter what we were reading or discussing or writing about, I had an opinion and I was willing to share it. (What
a nightmare I must have been, I realize now after having taught for twelve years… I was that kid. Oy.) My
teachers praised me for my ideas, and I took pride in my natural inclinations in English.
On Sundays, I remember sitting on my
twin bed in the room I shared with my sister, scratching out my analyses on the white paper with the blue lines in my spiral
notebooks as effortlessly as the leaves fell in autumn. At the end of the week, when Mr. Graham passed back our essays in
junior English, my classmates would groan, turn pale, or whisper obscenities in anticipation of their grades. I never worried
about what my grade would be: no matter what I wrote about, or how long I took to write, or how little effort I put into writing,
I always got an A. I was a good writer; that’s what all the evidence said. I left for college feeling pretty
confident about my writing abilities.
And then, I wrote my first college paper for Professor Smith's Introduction
to Psychology.
He was a notoriously difficult (and eccentric) professor. Students in his class, especially freshmen, learned quickly
not to be late, lest you be locked out until the first break (at which point the material he’d covered that morning
would be Greek to you, and good luck catching up). In his office was a bar from which he would hang by his ankles for one
hour each afternoon, “clearing his head.” And although he dressed to the nines for his classes, I never saw him
outside of class in anything other than a grey sweat suit.
I was eager to prove to this professor that I had all the skills necessary to be
an excellent student in his class. After a week of training rats to do things rats don’t really need to know how to
do, and touching the brains of deceased persons kind enough to donate their organs to science, it was time to “discuss
our findings” in our first academic paper. We were instructed to use the “APA guidelines” for documenting
our sources and organizing the sections of our essay. APA? That’s pretty much the same as MLA, right? It can’t
be that difficult…
That weekend I went back to the dorm with my first writing assignment of my college career,
and I did what I’d always done when presented with a daunting task: I put it off. I mean, this was one of the first
Friday nights of my college career as well, and there was partying to be done, people to meet, rules to break…
That Sunday
afternoon, after rolling out of bed, I gave a fleeting thought to the paper that was due the next morning. Afternoon stretched
into evening, and as the other freshmen in my dorm headed into full-blown panic at the tasks they, too, had in front of them,
I sauntered back to my room confidently. “Twelve hours,” I said to myself. “I can definitely knock out a
paper in twelve hours.” And rather than scratching my ideas out on the white paper with the blue lines of my old spiral
notebooks, I set to typing away on the sophisticated Commodore 64 desktop computer my dad had allowed me to take to college.
As
the sun rose, I congratulated myself on allowing that healthy dose of procrastination to provide me with just the sense of
urgency needed to complete my paper on time. Turning in that first college paper filled me with the same amount of pride I
imagined I would have four years later upon receiving my degree.
More rats. More brains. Discussions and readings and lectures.
And a week later we finally got our papers back. In high school, my “A’s” were always neatly recorded on
the title pages of my essays, circled in red, the type of Scarlet Letter that you’d be proud to adorn. There was no
such A on the title page of this essay. The second page held no clues to my grade either – no notes, no feedback, no
questions addressed to me. I began to feel that familiar sense of pride as I turned each equally pristine page on which my
teacher had not dared defile.
And then I got to the last page where Professor Smith had scrawled sideways in scratchy black
ink, “Wrong format. Use APA,” and circled a capital D.
Note to self: APA is indeed different than MLA. A lot different,
apparently.
In that moment, I recognized in the pit of my own stomach the fear and dismay of my high school classmates who had,
for years, experienced this feeling every time they wrote, turned something in, and got it back. It humbled and frightened
me. I knew not who I was.
Although I met with Professor Smith and tried to revise my paper in the “correct” format, the grade I
got on my first essay of my college career destined me for a C in the class. But even worse than that, I’d lost my confidence
as a writer. I’d lost my voice. That was the first time I remember feeling like what I wrote wasn’t good enough.
That I wasn’t good enough. And that my writing wasn’t just words on a piece of paper, but it was a reflection
of who I was and who I wanted to be.
And I wanted to be a high school English teacher.
How would I ever have the confidence
to write another paper? How could I ever help other people, teenagers, write their papers? I felt doomed to fail.
In that first
month of college, before the Internet, before cell phones, and before Skype, I racked up $250 in phone bills calling home
to my mom and crying. “I don’t know what I did wrong,” I told her. “I don’t know what to do
differently.” In the way that Moms do (especially when they’re a thousand miles away and can’t do much of
anything else), mine assured me that I would be just fine, and that a C wasn’t the end of the world. I picked myself
up, and moved on.
At least, I thought I had.
Then, in the summer of 2011, I took the Colorado Writing Project and experienced what it
was like to be a writer again. I experienced the fear and anxiety, but also the freedom and delight of writing. Of letters.
Of language.
And here I am now, on the other side of my college experience, and with twelve years of teaching behind me. And that
paper still haunts me. It haunts me even more now than it did then. Because for the past twelve years I’ve
been “teaching kids to write” by showing them what they’ve done wrong rather than by celebrating their successes.
I’ve bled my own ink over their words and destroyed their self worth with my arrogant pen. I’ve pretended like
what they wrote wasn’t a reflection of who they were and what they believed. I did to my students what Bob Jacobs had
done to me.
I remember my first year at Palmer when Iain, a sophomore, cried when I gave him the first D he ever got on a paper.
I told myself it was a learning experience. For him, not for me, of course. I mean, I already knew everything there was to
know about writing... He’s a US Marine now. And I made him cry. Do you think that he looks back on that experience with
gratitude? Do you think he learned to write better from that experience? Do you think he ever learned to really love writing?
I
don’t.
I think I stole his voice.
In the years since, I’ve established myself as a teacher who grades tough. Who “rapes”
her students’ essays. A teacher who helps her students learn how to write better, maybe, but doesn’t always make
them feel good about it. A teacher, in fact, who decides for her students what’s good and what’s bad, what’s
right and what’s wrong. Do you think my students learned to love writing from that kind of rigid approach to what should
be an introspective and creative experience? Whose voice was in the room: theirs or mine?
I stole their voice.
Enough of that.
Writing,
as it turns out, isn’t about good and bad. It’s not about right and wrong. And it’s not about formatting.
Writing
is about living life, and being able to convey what’s important to you in a way that makes sense to others. Writing
is about flailing around, trying to say what seems impossible to say. Writing is about a love of words, even the ones that
are forever on the tips of your tongues. Writing is about creating and recreating stories and your sense of reality. Writing
is about uncovering your own truths. Writing is about a love of life. Writing is about what matters to you. Writing is where
the truth gets told.
We are the stories we tell. I want what you write to be yours. Not mine. I want to help you find your voice, build
your confidence, and grow your writing into incredible reflections of your incredible selves.
So, this year we will write
together, we will trust the process, we’ll get messy and frustrated, and shut down and start back up again. We’ll
flounder around together, with words and style and structure. We’ll share our individual experiences and our individual
expertise. We’ll grow into a community of writers.
And in this community, I promise to challenge you in ways you haven’t been.
I promise to celebrate your successes. I promise never to steal your sense of self from you by highlighting your mistakes.
I promise you’ll be better writers when you leave the door the last time than when you came in the first time. But most
of all, I promise never to steal your voice.
Writer’s Memo for "On Brain-iacs and Voices"
This piece (part
memoir, part letter/manifesto?) was born out of the first writing that we did for the CWP – “My History as a Writer.”
I recognized that this experience was a pivotal one, but in the first draft, I was eager to gloss over it – to acknowledge
it and then put it away. So, I wasn’t entirely surprised when the feedback I got from you suggested that I focus on
that memory in particular – that there was a story there.
Initially, I focused on getting the paper back from my professor,
and the inner turmoil that low grade caused me. And then I realized that was the heartbeat of the story. Not in a self-indulgent,
pity me sort of way, but in a way that would allow me to create a relationship with my reader, which I began to understand
was my new group of students in the fall. I wanted to tell them my story: first, to create in them (perhaps) some animosity
towards me as one of those “natural” writers who never had to give it much effort, and then to show them my vulnerability
after receiving that low grade. Finally, I wanted to acknowledge that the way I’ve been teaching writing for the past
12 years created the same vulnerability and discomfort in my students, and that I was wrong.
I tried to address my new students earlier
in this piece, but it felt awkward. I imagine myself reading this piece to them early in my first week back at school. I want
them to know I write. I want them to hear my voice. And I want them to be slightly caught off guard at the personal promise
at the end. I want it to go from “interesting story about my teacher in high school/college” to “wow, she
expects me to be a writer, too?”.
The craft moves that I especially like in this piece include the recurring reference
to “voice.” Once I captured the idea that I didn’t want to steal my students’ voices, I went back
to the beginning of the piece and began building toward that concept, developing the fact that my writing gave me a lot of
pride and established my sense of identity.
I also really liked the reference to the Scarlet Letter – apropos, given
that I’m an English teacher. And my favorite paragraph is:
Dead Magpie: In Praise
of Liberal Arts Todd Hegert
My wife is fond of saying, “That’s why I
love being married to an English major.” Upon waking, Denise might ask me what the day is like. I’ll look out
the window and say, “the sun has cast a rosy glow over the mountains,” or, “the fog is peeling back like
gauze being removed from a fresh wound,” or, “the mist has lifted to reveal a world being made anew.”
“That,” she’ll
say, “is why I love being married to an English major.
I tell this story at a time when the value of liberal arts education–of studying English,
history, philosophy, religion–has come into question, if not under outright attack. New books like “Academically
Adrift” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, and “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” by Professor X, reflect
the erosion of liberal arts education and the proliferation of career-oriented degrees. An article in the June 6 New Yorker,
“Live and Learn: Why We Have College,” points out that the liberal arts sector of college education has shrunk
steadily since 1970 and the dominant political theory of higher education in America today holds that the cost high cost of
college can only be justified in terms of how it supplies workers fit for highly specialized vocations that help fuel the
economy. “When Barak Obama and Arne Duncan talk about how higher education is key to the future of the American economy,
this is the sector they have in mind. They are not talking about liberal arts education,” says New Yorker writer Louis
Menand. “Why should you have to pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper?”
Why indeed?
It’s an argument I see being played out in my own students, seniors earning
college-level English credit by taking an IB English class. Many of them proclaim with pleasure that mine will be the last
English class they ever take. Having earned advanced placement credit that fulfills their college composition requirements,
they intend never again to study a challenging novel, explicate a great poem, examine an aesthetic theory, or write an essay
about any form of art or literature. Why should they? What use Hamlet or
Beloved, Wordsworth or Plath, on their way to getting an MBA or becoming
an engineer? Why bother with great literature? Why would anyone want to be an English major?
Nodding appreciatively at their honesty, I tell them that, first of all, it helped
my woo a woman like my wife, and if they knew Denise, that would be reason enough. But for those who remain skeptical, I tell
the story of the dead magpie.
Last
summer, Denise and my granddaughter Paige reported a dead bird at the bottom of one of our window wells. I’m the one
who takes care of the carnage around our house. The black widow that needs killing. The moldy remains of the mouse that had
burrowed its way into the hollow frame of a basement window. The maggot-infested corpse of a squirrel I found inside a bag
of fertilizer in the garage. The dying fawn in the lilacs. The featherless hatchling the cat had dismembered on the patio.
Assorted characters of death and blight are my province. Or so my granddaughter reminded me several days later.
“Pop, Grandma says you have
to get rid of the dead bird in the window well. Today!”
Peering into the shadowy depths, I see the remains of a magpie, its withered black-and-white body
a full foot and a half long, wings matted and desiccated, eyehole blank, only feather, quill and air left. The window well
is grave deep, and when I lower myself in, I stand below the surface of the ground and look up into a vault of brilliant blue
sky. I had brought a small pitchfork with me, thinking, I guess, that I would simply spear the carcass and dispose of it.
But the English major in me says “linger and consider.”
I have had a running battle with our magpies. Perched
in our trees and on our roof, soiling the patio railing, eating the food I put out for the dog and the birdseed for the chickadees
and nuthatches, the magpies have mocked me with their arrogant caw, their screeching laugh. I look at this dead magpie, and
the English major in me thinks, “Where be your jibes and gambols now, my chapfallen fellow?”
Standing in essence underground, it also occurs to me
that, like Odysseus, I have entered a world of the dead, this magpie my blind Tiresias. “What prophesy can you give
me? What news of death and life?” the English major in me asks. I think of Persephone trapped in the underworld, waiting
for her time back in the sun. “What greater and lesser Elysian mysteries can you share?” I ask my matted magpie.
The English major in me also loves the esoteric language
of birding. I can identify the feather types and parts. Umbilicus, calamus, rachis, vane and blade, contoured remige feathers
and fanned retrice. Closely examining the magpie’s body in its ruinous state, I can see that the barbules and barbices
that knit the feathers together have decayed and lost their connections. I find a kind of occult pleasure in the knowledge
of this secret language.
Finally,
with a kind of ritual tenderness, I slip the pitchfork under the magpie. As I lift the magpie above my head, I see a sudden
burst of sunlight and sky through its blank eyehole. A perfect orb of universe, a cosmos in a pinhole, an eternity of galactic
time racing away through a puff of feathers! “My god, the English major in me thinks, “I have not just a dead
bird here, I have a poem!”
When
I present the carcass to Denise and Paige, they say only “Ewww!” and chuck it unceremoniously in the trash. And
the English major thinks, “O delicious irony” after the moment of cosmic vision I have just experienced.
What has all this to do with a liberal arts education?
Why does it matter that, with such gruesome work at hand, that I can recall lines from Hamlet, that I have read the classics and mythology, that I recognize the symbolic implications of my descent into the underworld,
that I savor the gnostic language of birds?
If I weren’t an English major, the experience of this charged moment would have been merely tedious and gross,
the meaning I found in it consigned to the trash. But because of my liberal arts education, I can return from the grave thinking,
“O beautiful, fascinating, cosmic world! O life! O death!”
“That,” my wife might say, “is what I love about being married to an English
major.”
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