teaching

DARYL FARMER

My writing class is like a community garden. The student begins with a seed
pulled from the earth of her mind which germinates at the end of her pen onto
the page where it expands, blossoms, wilts, or spreads. A wilderness grows,
wild, uncultivated. The wilderness inspires, enriches the soil. The land may now
be sectioned off, plowed, a garden sown. My job is to help her grow new
seeds, to transplant. I hand her the shears, show where to clip. She waters,
fertilizes, wipes the sweat from her brow as she leans on her shovel, laughs in
delight as the butterflies land and vines take hold. Her classmates are there,
each with garden plots of their own. A garden party! They take turns, helping
each other to build fences, pull weeds, (how hard it is, to get them to see that
their weeds are weeds and not flowers), spray for poisonous bugs. They imagine
the professionally landscaped gardens they’ve seen before and evaluate their
own in comparison.

Literature, writes Scott Russell Sanders, is “just like life, only books hold still so
we can look at them.” I believe this statement applies as well to the budding
texts students create in my writing class. As the dusk of each course session
approaches, the students stand back, admire, reflect, compare, consider their
world, their next day’s work.

Throughout the semester, we spend each week tending our texts: responding to
reading assignments, reflecting, sharing ideas. Students are guided to use
narratives and sensory detail, to create effective openings that immediately
draw their reader in. I want them to determine a central idea, a trellis they can
organize around, yet, as I respond to their stories, poems and essays, I constantly
look for ways the vines of their ideas can grow and stretch and blossom. I want
them to consider issues raised in their writing and to be aware of the power of
the language they cultivate.

I constantly stress grooming, and try to give students a variety of revision
strategies. In addition, I assign peer groups which meet throughout the
semester. I teach revision not only as a way of re-thinking their writing, but also
as a means of examining their lives and their communities, both on a local and
global level. Students are pushed to think deeper, to investigate the rich details
that surround them, to make connections, to relate to each other, to become
aware of what they share and where they differ. They are asked to consider,
and then re-consider their value systems, their education, where they fit in. I
encourage them to question, to challenge, to explore commonly held beliefs
from different perspectives. Often, the best writing asks more questions than it
answers, and I try to respond to their work by helping them clarify the questions
they are attempting to ask, what concerns they wish their reader to consider.

“Our chief want in life,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is somebody who shall
make us do what we can.” Teaching college writing has illuminated for me that
what students want is often what we want for them: to be engaged in our
subject matter, to expand their knowledge and their interests, to explore the
state of the world and consider ways to make a contribution. The writing
classroom is a place for them to connect with these opportunities. Through their
writing, individual conferences, and small group work, I am able to develop an
understanding of each student. Often, I individualize reading and writing
assignments for students based on what I learn about them.

Some of my most important work is to give students strategies not only to
invent, draft and revise, but also to participate in discussion, to provide
feedback on their peers’ work, to read rhetorically, to work in steady stages
rather than short bursts. I allow them to reflect not only on their written work,
but on their discussion and small group work as well. Students in my classes are
encouraged to attend and reflect on area readings, lectures, exhibits, plays, and
concerts; to take slow walks around their neighborhoods; to make, in other
words, human connections in the diverse wilderness outside the garden of the
university classroom.

Writing and literature students all sense that language empowers them. Many of
them come to me looking for guidance as to how to make their words come
alive on the page. What I offer them is a thimbleful of knowledge and an ocean
of curiosity. I can explain Freitag’s triangle, the advantages and disadvantages of
various points of view, or how to extrapolate the textured meaning of flight in
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. But, where does the magic come from? That
any artist finds it is an act of faith. You believe the parachute works, and you
jump from great heights, try to land feet first on the target. Helping students
land as close to that target as possible is my goal as a writing instructor. Helping
them to recognize and appreciate it is my goal when teaching literature. Sounds
simple? Well, okay. Until you come to the realization that no two targets look
alike. Some of them even stand in opposition. Sometimes, there’s a thick fog to
navigate. (Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury comes to mind). It is the mystery
of art as much as the understanding of it that I encourage students to embrace.

Neither Bahktin nor Derrida ever said it as far as I know, but the best advice I
know about teaching is to learn students’ names and get their evaluated papers
back to them in reasonable time. For every one hour of class, prepare to teach
an hour and a half. Keep regular office hours and a drawer full of Jolly Ranchers.

The longer I teach, write and live, I find myself inquiring deeper into the
interconnectivity of the various elements around me. While my primary
experience with analyzing and creating text has been as a writing and literature
teacher and scholar, much of what I know about writing I learned while studying
photography: to observe the world, to examine its intricacies, to look closer at
what others disregard. My studies in psychology have helped me to better
understand human behavior and motivation which I apply to the characters I
read and create. Courses in geology and meteorology have allowed me to
conceptualize time in million year increments, to have at my disposal a wealth
of new metaphor. When I teach writing, I am sponsoring a style of analyzing
literary texts, and when I teach literature, I can’t separate analysis from what I
know about the writing process. I took an astronomy class once. Sometimes
when I teach writing or literature, I talk about the stars. In ten years of teaching,
I’ve never seen this on an English curriculum, or a course “Aims and Scopes.”
Yet, no one has ever complained.

The student/teacher relationship is a complex ecology, each relying on the other
to thrive and flourish. Students provide nutrients for the soil from which my
intellect sprouts and spreads in ways that I can only hope that I reciprocate. The
garden I tend is a lush one, with deep roots and blossoms that never cease to
thrill me.

Some of my Favorite
Books for Teaching
Nonfiction Writing