Word After Word

I think the best book on how to teach writing is Abigail Thomas’ Safekeeping. Really, all one needs to know about teaching is in this book. A quote from page 8:

 ”She will have to tell her class. Make up an assignment.  Write two pages in which something valuable is given away on the street. What will they come up with, she wonders, wanting to know.”

Everything I want to steer towards and practice every day as at eacher is in these four sentences.  “She will have to tell her class.” How the teaching life has to have room for the real regular life, but not replace it. And not just talk about your own life in class, either. But just as the writer mines daily life for work, the teacher does too. “She will have to tell her class. Make up an assignment.” The best work we do in the classroom comes noticing how we learn a thing, how we see.

And this is what Thomas is so good at, her genius: wanting to know. This is the key: creating assignments and lessons and days and classrooms where we care so much, really wonder what will they come up with? 

When we’re teaching like this, it’s not draining at all. We never say, “I have a stack to grade, I’m swamped.” We’re not swamped. We are in it, together, noticing and hitting the ball back. It’s really essentially exactly like my best babysitting days (and how much I loved living in other people’s houses).  There weren’t any babies and there wasn’t any sitting–together we made these fabulous plays of all kinds and my role was just to make sure we were in on time.