Teacher

My father was a shop teacher.

I spent much of my childhood watching him build furniture, teaching middle-school students how to sand, how to use a bandsaw, how to plan out a project, how to execute that project. He would lecture, tell them what to do…and then they were turned loose to build their own projects. At the beginning of the semester, he would bring home stacks of half-built, lopsided birdhouses, destined for the fireplace. But by the end of the semester, his classroom was full of solid, well-crafted pieces of furniture.

Building furniture is a craft, one that you can be taught, but one that you must practice if you are to do it well. The craft of writing, I believe, shares much with the craft of building.

I believe in giving students guidance at the beginning, telling them what is expected, sketching out the basic rules, talking about what has worked for other people and what has worked for me, as a writer.

But that’s not the real work, the real magic. The real magic, the part of teaching I love, is when I set them a task. “Write,” I say. “We’ve talked about writing, how to plan your project, how to execute it. Now go and write.“

They write. They bring it in to class. We read it out loud. More often than not, some of it is good, but much of it is half-built, lopsided. We talk about what is good and bad about their writing, about their work, in a respectful way. I’ll say – “remember when we talked about dialog at the beginning – THIS is a great example of what I was talking about.” I point out where they should have used a different tool, where a nail instead of a screw would have done.

Then I give them another task. “Write more,” I say. We repeat the process. Their craftsmanship, their ability to put words on the page in a meaningful way, gets better and better. By the end of the semester, I have a folder full of solid, well- crafted pieces of writing.

Someone once told me that you can’t learn to write, that you write to learn. That philosophy is at the core of both my approach to writing and to teaching – the idea that you can and should spend time teaching the rules, but in the end, the best way to teach and learn the craft of writing, is by writing.

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Illustration by Erin Brown at www.eobrownart.com.