TITLE: Good Teaching Is Grounded In Generosity Of Spirit
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 27, 2016 10:26 AM
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In
My Writing Education: A Time Line,
George Saunders recounts stories of his interactions with
writing teachers over the years, first in the creative writing
program at Syracuse and later as a writer and teacher himself.
Along the way, he shows us some of the ways that our best
teachers move us.
Here, the teacher gets a bad review:
Doug gets an unkind review. We are worried. Will one of us
dopily bring it up in workshop? We don't. Doug does. Right
off the bat. He wants to talk about it, because he feels
there might be something in it for us. The talk he gives us
is beautiful, honest, courageous, totally generous. He shows
us where the reviewer was wrong -- but also where the reviewer
might have gotten it right. Doug talks about the importance
of being able to extract the useful bits from even a hurtful
review: this is important, because it will make the next book
better. He talks about the fact that it was hard for him to
get up this morning after that review and write, but that he
did it anyway. He's in it for the long haul, we can see.
I know some faculty who basically ignore student assessments of
their teaching. They paid attention for a while at the beginning
of their careers, but it hurt too much, so they stopped. Most of
the good teachers I know, though, approach their student assessments
the way that Doug approaches his bad review: they look for the
truths in the reviews, take those truths seriously, and use them
to get better. Yes, a bad set of assessments hurts. But if you
are in it for the long haul, you get back to work.
Here, the teacher gives a bad review:
What Doug does for me in this meeting is respect me, by
declining to hyperbolize my crap thesis. I don't remember what
he said about it, but what he did not say was, you know:
"Amazing, you did a great job, this is publishable, you rocked
our world with this! Loved the elephant." There's this theory
that self-esteem has to do with getting confirmation from the
outside world that our perceptions are fundamentally accurate.
What Doug does at this meeting is increase my self-esteem by
confirming that my perception of the work I'd been doing is
fundamentally accurate. The work I've been doing is bad. Or,
worse: it's blah. This is uplifting -- liberating, even -- to
have my unspoken opinion of my work confirmed. I don't have to
pretend bad is good. This frees me to leave it behind and move
on and try to do something better. The main thing I feel:
respected.
Sometimes, students make their best effort but come up short.
They deserve the respect of an honest review. Honest doesn't
have to be harsh; there is a difference between being honest and
being a jerk. Sometimes, students don't make their
best effort, and they deserve the respect of an honest review,
too. Again, being honest doesn't mean being harsh. In my
experience, most students appreciate an honest, objective review
of their work. They almost always know when they are coming up
short, or when they aren't working hard enough. When a teacher
confirms that knowledge, they are freed -- or motivated in a new
way -- to move forward.
Here, the teacher reads student work:
I am teaching at Syracuse myself now. Toby, Arthur Flowers, and
I are reading that year's admissions materials. Toby reads
every page of every story in every application, even the ones we
are almost certainly rejecting, and never fails to find a nice
moment, even when it occurs on the last page of the last story
of a doomed application. "Remember that beautiful description
of a sailboat on around page 29 of the third piece?" he'll say.
And Arthur and I will say: "Uh, yeah ... that was ... a really
cool sailboat." Toby has a kind of photographic memory re
stories, and such a love for the form that goodness, no matter
where it's found or what it's surrounded by, seems to excite his
enthusiasm. Again, that same lesson: good teaching is grounded
in generosity of spirit.
It has taken me a long time as a teacher to learn to have Toby's
mindset when reading student work, and I'm still learning. Over
the last few years, I've noticed myself trying more deliberately
to find the nice moments in students' programs, even the bad ones,
and to tell students about them. That doesn't mean being dishonest
about the quality of the overall program. But nice moments are
worth celebrating, wherever they are found. Sometimes, those are
precisely the elements students need to hear about, because they
are the building blocks for getting better.
Finally, here is the teacher talking about his own craft:
During the Q&A someone asks what Toby would do if he couldn't
be a writer.
A long, perplexed pause.
"I would be very sad", he finally says.
I like teaching computer science, but what has enabled me to stay
in the classroom for so many years and given me the stamina to
get better at teaching is that I like doing computer
science. I like to program. I like to solve problems. I like
to find abstractions and look for ways to solve other problems.
There are many things I could do if I were not a computer scientist,
but knowing what I know now, I would be a little sad.
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