Teaching

Full day teaching workshop tomorrow. But I’ve already got my heroes, as far as teaching goes. I just need to get the procedural specifics down. I’m so freaking tired today for some reason. Third quadruple cappuccino, suns gone down, and I’m still not awake. Maybe I should just let it go until tomorrow.

Of all the essays I’ve read recently, “Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Novelists” by Kurt Vonnegut sums up what I’d like to do best:

When I taught at Iowa, then Harvard, then City College, here is what I tried to get away with, only in effect, not actually: I asked each student to open his or her mouth as wide as possible. I reached in with thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there.

I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there.

That, to me, sounds like teaching.