I have spent more of my life as a student than as a teacher. I hope that will continue to be true. The phrase “lifelong student” feels cheesy to me, but it describes my attitude toward life, writing, and teaching. It is what any teacher wants to instill in their students—the urge to approach things openly and with curiosity, to read and write toward exploration rather than explanation. How can we ask our students to bring something to the classroom if we are not willing to also bring it?

​

My go-to icebreaker is called “meatgrinder” an exercise where students pair up and each one tells a story from a particular time in their life. The pairs shift and students tell new stories—starting with their earliest memory and ending with something from that morning. Then, we come together as a class and they each share one of the stories they heard. I developed this exercise to get students thinking about the stories they already tell in their everyday life, but it has the added benefit of creating a safe space for them to get to know each other, to listen and be heard. It lays the foundation for our classroom community and sets the expectation that they will support each other’s storytelling.

​

When assembling the content for my courses, I balance older, canon writers with newer, working writers. Students might initially respond better to Machado than Chekhov, but I find it’s essential to get them to “eat their vegetables.” Often with these older pieces, students already understand what is going on but the language isolates them and makes them question themselves. I put the story on the board, and we look at it page-by-page, asking questions like “what do we learn?” and “what questions are being asked or answered?” By the time the schoolmistress is watching the train pass, they understand that their dislike of her is intentional, but that she has a deep interiority and is animated by desire. Along with the vegetables, I try to serve protein in the form of contemporary, living writers, so students can understand the current literary landscape and, hopefully, do some reading on their own. I have been able to convince exactly one student to buy a book after reading an excerpt for class—it’s my crowning achievement.

​

My approach to all work, regardless of when it was written, is to read it like a writer. This means coming to a text with the understanding that it was constructed intentionally by another human being, and if you read closely enough, you will see the process of that construction. Once you know how something might have been made, it loses some of its magic. But it has also taught you how to pull off the same magic in your own work. This is exactly the kind of work I do on my own and what can sustain a writer’s growth over decades.

​

In the scope of a course, initial assignments are generative and brief, with no minimum or maximum word count, to encourage students to simply relax on the page and let their minds wander. Students should build a repertoire of memories, details, and ideas that can be used to build up a longer, more thoughtful piece. Finally, revision; students rarely get the chance to revisit a piece of writing they have turned in for a grade. Many students have expressed, and I agree, that the work turned in on the due-date often feels incomplete. There is work to be done if you just had one more day, or there are things you saw to change only after submission. I want to give students the opportunity to go back to those pieces, and encourage them to experiment with the material they’ve already generated. 

​

The entire time I have been a teacher, I have also been a student. I am intimate with the kinds of frustrations a student might have with a teacher. In every classroom, whether as student or instructor, I bring an open mind ready to take in the knowledge that space has to offer me. No matter how many times I teach a story or poem or essay, every semester I have a student tell me something about a piece that I hadn’t considered before. Some new understanding I wasn’t capable of by myself. We are self-contained beings, but we ache for connection, to expand beyond the confines of our selves and, even if just for a moment, belong to something bigger. That is the magical potential of the classroom, a potential I try to actualize in all my courses.

​