[THE WRITER'S LIFE] The Thing About Writing
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He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
--
Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman 

As a non-traditional teacher, the quote above has always dogged my teaching experience. I even go so far as to refer to myself as an “educator” rather than a “teacher” so as not to mislead anyone that I am properly credentialed or degreed. I have plenty of each, just not those that the venerable institution of American Education prefers.

I teach anyway, and it is one of the things I do to create a writing life. I have taught students from kindergarten to retirement age in informal classes, workshops and community college. Teaching is one of the greatest pleasures I have. Occasionally, though, that quote has taunted me: “No wonder you teach; you can’t write. What kind of writer are you anyway? I don’t see any books with your name on them.” And so on and so on . . .

The course I generally teach is based on one I designed almost twenty years ago. Journal Club was an after-school program I held at the elementary school where I was the computer lab instructor. For about eight weeks each semester, more than fifteen kids in 3rd to 5th grade would come willingly to the computer lab and write from prompts and then read from that writing. Although the course has been modified over the years and buttressed with research, it remains basically the same at its heart: a facilitated writing time designed to allow each writer to learn to hear his or her own writing voice.

Then this year, miracle of miracles, I published my first book. The threshold of published writer had been crossed! I was an Author. How do you like that credential, American Ed.? (Turns out, not so much. Whatever.)

But I still have the classes I teach at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (affectionately known as OLLI) at the local branch of the University of Connecticut. My most recent class comprised twelve students all over the age of at least sixty-five who had all signed up to “learn” to write. As if they needed teaching.

Each of my OLLI courses reveals something exciting and profound in one form or another. One year, a reticent student sat quiet, respectfully passing up opportunities to read from his work until the morning he read about the day he and his squad shot an Egyptian soldier and carried him around in their tank during the Six Day War. The class was speechless and I couldn’t believe his bravery, forty years earlier and that morning. This semester, a seemingly timid woman, who immediately professed being a complete novice at writing, began surprising us all with her raw and heartfelt prose about the difficulties and challenges in her life. She spared no one, primarily herself. She wrote to me after the class was over for the semester and thanked me for . . . well, I’ll be honest with you--I have no idea what she thanked me for. I didn’t do anything; it was all her. Her life, her words, her voice. She wrote me again about a month later--an e-mail with an attachment. She wanted to tell me that she had continued to observe our Friday morning class period as her writing time each week and sent along some of her latest work. Again, it was an amazing expression of thought and experience worded easily and evocatively in her precise prose.

This is the thing about writing: it’s a part of everyone’s life, not just the domain of a few so-called authors. What I’ve learned about writing is that it is a phenomenological process by which we humans process our understanding of the meaning of life. This ability shows up in each of us in different ways, but it is as much a part of our nature as expressive beings as thinking and speaking. This is just how I look at writing (and I have an entire thesis about it if you’d care to read it) and for me it is affirmed semester after semester, class after class, student after student. 

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Comments
  • Thank you for sharing this experience, Cindy!  I have been working to kick off a writer's meetup close to my home and the fellow writers who have shown up have floored me with their raw honesty.  Their words are so inspiring to listen to!  The benefit to me is time set aside, at least on Monday evenings, for writing, for generating content when my mind cannot focus, and it is in the inspiration that I continually receive from those who show up at the table.

  • Charlene Diane Jones

    THanks Cindy...that really does clarify for me! 

  • Susan Allison

    Love this! You can and do!

  • Charlene, thanks for asking :) The way I understand the quote (from Alfred Korzybski) is that a map can show you a route to get from one place to another, but the understanding of the surrounding territory is different for everyone, based on hundreds of different personal perceptions. We all share a sense of a familiar reality (the map), but each of our individual realities create our own territory.   For me it describes how the road can be the same, but the experience is not. In teaching, for example, one teacher can teach the same lesson to 20 students and there will be 20 unique perceptions of what is being taught. It's a whole theory of perception and reality and I'm not sure I am clarifying it for you! Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

  • Charlene Diane Jones

    Cindy I went for a walk and realized I don't really understand what you mean by "the map is not the territory." Sorry to be thick but if you would explain a bit more...thank you!

  • Charlene Diane Jones

    Hi Cate and yes, the river. It's impossible to stand in the same river once goes the zen saying. So it is with identity. I might say sorry that you endured pain, but from my experience and from what I read between the lines in your writing, what you have experienced has raised the level of awareness. In this life, that is the priority value: how do we remain and grow in consciousness? How to craft consciousness, as a life involvement? With this as the start point, experiences are neither bad nor good, only bringing about awareness or still working...Sheridan! Echoes through so many memories...I did not teach fashion at all, was assigned and learned to love the Nursing school and then Academic upgrading. Yes, the river...

     

  • Thank you, Jean, for your comment. Charlene, I feel that I am a teacher by nature, not necessarily credentials. And surely your own experience allows you to teach others that the "map is not the territory" as is so often believed. Thank you both for your contributions to the conversation.

  • Charlene Diane Jones

    I agree, that quote so snips the true stretch of someone who loves to teach. It is in the parlance, an art not a routine. I taught for eight years at Sheridan College back in the late eighties and early nineties but so learned the teaching I am compelled to do, crafting consciousness, doesn't fall under the curriculum anywhere. So I am in private practice as a what? Life Coach certainly, Psychotherapist focusing on Body Intelligence, Breath and Night Dreams, Meditation Teacher who teaches Western Meditation approaches although so much of life has been spent exploring Eastern, especially Tibetan Buddhist Meditation.

    What do I want to teach? I want to teach that identity is not solid and unwavering, not a flag we carry across a field, not a place with a basement and four walls, ceilings. Identity rises from experience. Therefore when we have been raped, as I have, and tortured, as I have, witness to gruesome murder as I have, when our parents illness spilled across our childhood, as mine did, still identity does not rest there. It is not enough to say I was raped. It is more like it to express what happens in our daily lives,now, and how important it is for us to focus on the shifting sands of breath, riding that breath as if one rides a camel on the desert. No amount of sand is exactly the same. The weather patterns change. The night falls. In other words, identity is a geography, with desert and lakes, with mountains some of which we scale, with swamps and breathtaking views...that is what I teach and what I hope to bring to others.   

  • Jean P. Moore

    Wonderful, thoughtful piece, Cindy. You " can" and you "do." Thank you for giving voice to the writer within all all of us.

  • Pamela Olson

    Thanks, Cindy. I only know the quote in the context of snobby people using it to denigrate teachers. :P

  • Here's another thing about writing; I love all the smart ideas and contributions! Thank you Cate and Pamela for taking the time to leave your responses. Regarding the quote: I believe it  was written as satirical, but out of context, it is used derogatorily against teachers. Of course, any vocation can be inserted, can't it? "Those who can, do; those who can't, practice law. Or whatever! ;-)

  • Pamela Olson

    He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
    --
    Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
    I've always thought of this quote as supercilious bollocks. Teachers are DOING SOMETHING -- they are teaching, and it is a skill that, like other skills, can be done sloppily or can be carefully honed and highly developed into a kind of artform. And without teachers teaching (especially the good ones), the world would be so much poorer (Socrates, anyone?) and all our knowledge would risk being lost to most humans.

    Some teachers absolutely can "do" whatever it is they are teaching, but they prefer teaching. (There are many things to recommend teaching, especially to certain types of personalities.) My sister was an engineer for a while, but she hated it. Now she's a physics teacher, constantly undergoing professional development and doing research on her own, evolving her teaching style as she goes, and she finds it immensely rewarding (and so do her happy students). Right now I'm choosing to try to make it as a writer, but I can foresee a day when interacting with students will be more rewarding than polishing my own stories (and, ahem, almost never getting paid -- and we all know pay is not in any way linearly dependent on quality). Some people are inspired in their own writing life by the writers they teach.

    And when I think back on the people who had the most impact on my life, lots and lots of excellent, dedicated teachers come to mind. Including the one who got me started journaling when I was fifteen years old.

    Sorry, just had to rant for a minute. I really, really hate that ignorant, snobby quote. :)