What Teaching Has Taught Me

The academic year is winding down, and I'm about to be deluged with student portfolios to grade. This has been my first full year of teaching creative writing to undergraduates, and I'm reminded of J. M. Coetzee's observation from his novel Disgrace:

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

I'm not convinced my students have learned nothing, but I have surely learned as much from them as I have taught. Their questions have forced me to clarify my own ideas about writing. Their work reminds me of the infinite variety of forms writing can take. And their progress suggests paths for me to explore in my own work.

One example. At the beginning of this term, some of my students have been having problems with the use of time in their work. Their narratives can skid disconcertingly from present to past to future, sometimes within the same sentence. To study control of time and pacing, we took a look at the first chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions and timed the narrative to see how many sentences she used to move her story forward. (You can read an essay I wrote about this here.) One of the things we noticed was that by eschewing flashbacks as much as possible and folding the effects of the past into her present narrative, Tyler was able to build her narrative momentum and keep the reader hooked.

Gradually, I began noticing the salutary effects of this exercise on students' writing. Stories that were once confusing, distanced, dragging summaries suddenly came alive on the page, thrillingly. Characters we'd only heard about now breathed, felt, fought in front of our eyes. The prose seemed to clean itself up, as if of its own accord.

Glad to see my students' progress, I turned to my own work, the novel about Berlin I'm working on right now. I'd shown the first few chapters to a few friends who all agreed that as it went along it became more and more engrossing, despite a bumpy start. I re-read the first two chapters. What was going wrong?

Then I thought of the lesson I'd just taught my students about chronology. The present day action was getting dragged down by relentless flashbacks, flashbacks that I'd thought were necessary for the reader to appreciate the significance of the current story. So what if I did what my students had done and removed those flashbacks?

As an experiment, I opened a new file and removed every flashback I could find and laid them out in order. My new arrangement was a strong, swift Chapter One that introduced the present-day plot with little background, then a chapter two that contained the entire backstory as a separate, linear story, followed by a strong, swift chapter three that picked up where chapter one had left off and zoomed forward. It was an elegant solution to a difficult problem that might have taken me a lot longer to solve, if not for the lesson on chronology that my students and I had worked on together.

The other thing I've gained from teaching is a newfound love and appreciation for literary works outside of my main genre: fiction. As part of my Structure and Style class at Columbia, I was required to introduce students to poetry and playwriting. For my Fiction and Personal Narrative class at Barnard, I had to examine fiction as well as creative non-fiction. I've realized that I've been missing out on a rich variety of literary genres because I've focused my reading diet on fiction. Poetry has taught me about the power of language in distilled form, while playwriting has taught me how to tell a story wholly through dialogue, and non-fiction has helped me appreciate the rigorous art of shaping a narrative from true events.

This fall I'll be taking a year off from teaching, and I know I will miss the dynamic atmosphere of my creative writing classes, where rooms full of students have challenged, enlightened, and stimulated me this past academic year. I'd like to wish them all good luck and especially to say thank you, for all you've taught me.