What’s Your Favorite Thing About Teaching?
Each semester there are amazing students, these people who are like angel-people passing through the halls. Maria is one. Maria is passionate about the poetry of Norway. She feels called to teach. She thinks about teaching, all the time, she says. “It’s kind of scary.” She asked me, yesterday, sitting on my little plaid sofa, “So what’s your favorite thing about teaching?”
It’s such a good question. I told her I would have to think. I wrote the question down on an orange post it. “I’ll get back to you.”
Just as Maria left, my editor called from Boston. “You have the most amazing students. Do amazing people just go to Hope College? Are you just teaching in this place where there’s only brilliant writers?” My editor said one of the nicest things I have heard, to date. She said the student work I’d sent her, for inclusion in the new edition of my textbook, was the best student work she had ever read. I just let myself soak this up. It is really really easy to fixate on criticism and negative things, and realy hard to fixate on praise, and affirmation.
I think the work is amazing, but I wasn’t sure if anyone else would. I know how hard they work. But I don’t know how they do it, these students. Definitely the high point of the day and one of the high points of my teaching career, my editor saying, “I can’t get over the quality of this work. I almost can’t believe it’s students.” My editor said she thought it had to be me. Something I was doing to get such amazing work.
Well, I wish that were it. I wish that were it and I could take credit and get an amazing raise (which I very, very, very much want and need). But I don’t think it works like that.
I think these angel students come into the room and they’re the ones that make some kind of space for us all to be in. Someone who wants to learn and loves learning—it’s like being around someone who wants to pray and loves praying, or wants to play and loves playing. You’re taken in, swept away. It’s alchemy. A thing we do together. It really is. I couldn’t’ do what I do without them. But they could –and do—absolutely do what they do without me.
So I reread Maria’s question at dinner, and before I went to bed.
Today I still don’t know. What’s my favorite thing about teaching? My students are doing great work. I love to be around them and I love to read their work. is that my favorite thing? That’s kind of like the Whole Thing.
My favorite thing about teaching is that it is not work. It’s an essential and a luxury, just like water, just like air. We have to have it and we are so lucky to have it. There’s no downside to teaching, no tedious or difficult or gnarly part. Teaching amplifies the most meaningful parts of life—our connections to each other, learning, doing creative work, making meaning, asking questions, feeding each other and drinking in solitude.
Maybe my favorite thing about teaching is that teaching is my favorite thing.
I never wanted to do anything else.
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