Available Surfaces V: Can Teaching be Written? [T.R. Hummer]

I
stand before a new class, Introduction to Poetry Writing. There are, believe it
or not, 55 students present. Where I teach, the introductory courses are big,
with breakout sections led by TAs. My responsibility is, theoretically, to
orient and inform the students about matters of craft, and to begin to give
them a road map to the wilderness that is the past and present—not to mention
the future—of poetry. I also am responsible for supervising and mentoring the
TAs, who, while still doing time in the salt mines of teaching composition, are
about to take the wheel of their first writing workshop.

 

If
the workshop model for teaching creative writing is often questioned and even
reviled, what about this approach? I am lecturing about creative writing. What
possible good can that do?

 

For
years I resisted this kind of pedagogy, not only in the teaching of writing but
also in literary studies. Small must be better, always, I thought. And I still
think small group study is absolutely essential, in creative writing and
elsewhere. But my recent experiences with large group study convinces me that
there is a place in the curriculum for this approach as well. Call me old
fashioned (all together now. . .), but the suspicion has grown increasingly strong in me that
undergraduates suffer from a lack of broad survey literary courses: not that such courses must be taught as lecture courses, but they generally used to be taught that way, and their disappearance coincides with the decline in lecture-style teaching. Student
knowledge has deepened in certain areas, but is spotty: they don’t have an aerial
view, or a good topographical map of the territory. In creative writing as in
other fields, such a vision can be indispensible.

Furthermore,
teaching in this context has revealed to me a certain vocation: I enjoy working
with these large groups partly because I have discovered that I can do it. I have certain valuable
nuggets to impart to students that, it appears, can best be communicated in
this kind of forum. I have uncovered a vein of something like eloquence that is
rarely called forth in small group discussion but which is laid bare before the
large group, a dimension of my own character that my students allow me to
explore, and seem to enjoy observing from a relatively safe distance, also not
permitted in the seminar room or workshop where everything is up close and
personal all the time. Perspective is important; distance can be useful. Every
artist knows this; teachers may know it too.

*

 

Any
actor of broad experience will tell you that, from the point of view of craft,
the big difference between working in theater and working in front of a camera
is one of scale. Camera work is intimate; a whisper can resonate. On film,
Brando mumbles, and his mumbling is devastating. On stage, you cannot mumble,
even if your character is a mumbler; there you must project, even while
projecting the illusion that you are mumbling, if that is what is called for.
In the theater everything is writ large: voice and gesture, and ultimately
character. On stage, you play a different game—not a better or a worse one, but
one that has different parameters.

 

The
craft of seminar teaching is more like working with a camera: everything is
close; silences, whispers, mumbles are part of the game. One makes an
observation or asks a question and waits, observing the lift of an eyebrow
here, a shifted gaze there, a sigh, a sudden gleam in someone’s eyes. The
moment can’t be pushed; however much you may, by constitution, like or dislike
those dead spots in seminar discourse (the Pregnant Silence) when everyone is
digesting something, when responses are taking form, you have to ride them,
wait them out, step aside like a bullfighter executing a veronica (alas poor
Veronica: how many times has she died for our sins?). In the big classroom, the
dynamic is different, and so is the expectation. And yet the issue of
relatedness is still the center: all of this is for the audience, not for you.

 

In
either case, we teachers are there to present
and to represent. In Heidegger-speak,
we are there to bring something out of concealment into the realm of
unconcealment and allow it to linger. We present the subject matter and it
becomes present; we are its representative.

 

The
“de-centered” pedagogy of the seminar or the small class, regardless of its
strengths and weaknesses (which ought, it seems to me, to be debated in a more
balanced way from time to time), has become the desired academic norm, and has
even attained a certain aura of political correctness, as though any other way
of teaching is inadequate, mechanical, or—worst of all—a theater for the
parading of the ego. All these things may sometimes be true; I note in
particular the rise of the PowerPoint lecture as particularly insidious: some
professors used to let their decades-old notes lecture to their students; now
those notes have been automated. But the fact that a method can be misused does
not mean that it has to be.

 

It’s
possible, in a small seminar setting, for the reticence of the instructor to be
overdone as well. I have seen teachers, in the interest of “de-centering,”
spend a whole term allowing students to go round and round in circles, unable
to break the Möbius strip of their own limited knowledge. I have seen lazy
teachers dump their workload onto the students, fading into the woodwork and
doing essentially nothing, leaving the students responsible for finding their
own way out of the wilderness. These abuses are at least as insidious as those
that can insinuate their way into the lecture hall.

 

When,
years ago at a writers conference, I saw a famous poet, having sat silent through
ten minutes of students’ discussion of a student poem, suddenly arouse himself
and intone “I believe this poem should be divided into two halves”—suddenly
ripping the page in half—“and both halves should be deposited in the garbage," I
knew I was in the presence of a bully. The oldest style of creative writing
pedagogy, in fact, seems to have involved a good deal of this kind of behavior,
and I am certain that it still happens. That kind of bullying, and ego
mongering, is more possible and more dangerous in small classrooms than in
large. One can place one’s ego on display in front of a large room full of
people, but to actually use it as a weapon is arguably more difficult.
“Conscience is a thousand witnesses,” says Hobbes, meaning something negative
by his remark, but I take it as a positive: light dissolves the vampire.

 

*

 

What
I have learned about large group teaching is that there one balances what one presents and what one represents on a different scale than in
the small class. One’s role at the seminar table is to be one more guest at the
feast, yes, but in a properly hostly way, which means a balancing of courtesy
with leadership. In the large class, it’s more a matter of dealing with baskets
of loaves and fishes; the multitude is hungry for sustenance, table manners be
damned. Miracles of multiplication are called for, and in that equation there
is no room for ego: the one who holds the basket represents a higher power.

 

This
is not Alcoholics Anonymous, friends: nothing mystical is involved. The “higher
power” is simply the subject that the group has convened around. In the small
group, one tends at best to present and then get out of the way; in the large
group, one must present and then immediately represent. By which I mean simply
this: if I am talking about poetry in the theater of the large classroom I must
become poetry. When I speak to my
students about a poem, I must speak to them as the poem would speak if it could
hold forth not about its content but about its Being. I must allow the poem to
be written, quite completely, in and on me: I become the medium of the poem’s
presence. The poem walks into the room and delivers itself to students as it
would if it were capable of getting up off the page, embodying itself in three
dimensions (or four or five) and revealing itself in that incarnation. For the
poem this is not difficult, since poems live and move and have their being in
receptive readers everywhere; for the teacher, though, it is rather a
challenge. There is not room in me for both my ego and the poem. If my ego
pushes the poem out, then the moment fails, just as if an actor insists on
playing himself and not the character, the play fails.

 

Admittedly,
there is a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in this contract. There is also an
illusory dimension to small seminar teaching—to pretend otherwise is to be
disingenuous. There is always a role to play, a costume to wear, a dialect to
assume. That’s not a bad thing; it’s part of the territory. And territory is
really the issue: one presents a map, so to say, to a country of which the
student knows little; the student is preparing for an expedition, and there is
much he or she needs to know in advance. The teacher presents the map, and then
acts as a representative of the territory: having been there, the teacher knows
the way in, the way around, and the way out again. But if this transaction
becomes at any point territorial—if I
am determined to defend my little hunk of knowledge, my seminar table or my
lectern, from the student rather than
make it available to the student,
then I commit malpractice.

 

Teaching
small groups is a joy and a privilege; so is teaching large groups. A few
decades of practice in the small class setting has taught me an enormous amount
about human and textual dynamics on a small scale, and I would not exchange
that knowledge for anything; I still happily teach seminars and small workshops
and am rewarded by doing so.

 

But
walking out into the large theater has been a revealing and liberating
experience for me these past few years—as if one had spent decades in small,
though lovely, rooms and suddenly found a doorway that led out into an enormous
panorama, a sublime landscape, its map already written in my mind and on my
body, and that somehow, miraculously, speaks when I speak.