or
A PEDAGOGY OF AUTHENTICITY
or
A MANIFESTO FOR ONE
WRITING AS BEING
- Writing is not a collection of skills. It is not the tricks of the trade. It is not a mastery of craft. It might involve these things, but it is not them.
- Writing is a way of life, a way of being.
- As with most ways of being, one may be initiated into the writing life. Which is to say it may be learned. Which is to say it may be taught.
- How is it learned? Curiosity, appreciation, admiration, practice, effort, love, dedication. So many words come rushing to mind, all of them orbiting wonder. Only later does instruction come also to mind.
- How is it taught? By making one’s own learning public, by maintaining one’s wonder.
- When the student is ready, the saying goes, the teacher appears.
- If the saying did not end there it would go on to say, And when she appears it will be not as a teacher but as herself. You relate to her as a teacher through your apprenticeship.
- Her enthusiasm she shares. Her devotion she models. Her way of being, it becomes contagious. (And if you do not contract the contagion, do not worry. You may be immune to the writing bug, at least this strain of it.)
- I will exaggerate to make the point, but only slightly: Everything I know about writing I know from watching up close how Debra Gwartney carries herself.
- The student–teacher relationship is one to one and determined by the student.
- Writing, like Jesus, is medicine for the sick. You remember all those Sunday School kids sneaking off to roll joints in the bathroom. But you also remember the despairing nighttime souls who found in Christ their only possible salvation. You remember them well. Were you not one of them?
- The implications for a university are there to be noticed. If your mission is to educate: 1) no grades; 2) no degrees; 3) open the doors; 4) let the learning begin.
- Teaching what you know seems good, better than teaching what you don’t know, but maybe not as good as not teaching what you know.
- If I remember right, on the first day of his counseling classes, Carl Rogers would sit down and say to his students, “So, what should this class be about?” If I were a better teacher, this would be my pedagogy, too.
- A teacher must teach what he knows, sure. More profoundly, he must be who he is. And he must teach whomever is there to learn.
- If you want to get better at writing, practice writing. If you don’t, don’t. The uselessness of writing is what makes it holy.
- Case in point: How am I writing this manifesto? The way I scratch an itch. And before I started writing there was no itch there to scratch.
- The being is in the doing. The doing is in the being. The writing is in the writing. The practice is the practice, says my yoga teacher, a master of teaching without teaching.
WRITING AS THINKING
- Writing is a method of thinking, I tell my students.
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” says Joan Didion.
- Why am I writing this essay? Because I want to find out what it has to say.
- How did I learn to write? No one taught me. I got interested in it. That’s all. And then everyone started teaching me. Dave Eggers. Zadie Smith. Henry Alley. Bob Dylan. Emerson. Nietzsche. Didion. Wallace. David Shields. Eula Biss. Cheri Register. Jude Nutter. Patricia Weaver Francisco. Natalie Goldberg. Basho. Issa. Ikkyu. Lao Tzu. Chuang Tzu. Dogen. And on and on we could go through a Borgesian library of gifts.
- If you want to write, you’ll figure out how.
- I started writing the things I needed to write. Case in point: teaching philosophy as manifesto.
- My teaching philosophy, whatever else it may be, must be authentic to my genealogy, must be grounded in who I am. Who is that? I’m finding out as I go, sentence by sentence, influence by influence, class by class.
- You sign up for a class, you get the teacher you get and not some other teacher. The only thing one teacher has to offer that another assuredly does not is himself.
- There is one way I have found to avoid feeling like an imposter. Show up and be myself without apology. It sounds like such a low bar.
- I am what I am. Someone who doesn’t want to waste time trying to teach people what they don’t want to know. Someone who asks, How do I make them want to know? Someone who answers, By putting them in the company of good writing, the company of good thought, and letting nature run its course.
- Not doing enough? Determined to push water uphill? Still feel like a fraud up there in front of the class? Feel deeply into the feeling of fraudulence. It can be one form authentic feeling takes.
- I am what I am. Someone who feels like he isn’t well read. Someone who never “received” an “education.” Someone who isn’t as smart as many of the people he interacts with. Someone who should be taking the class, not teaching it. I have so much more to learn.
- So I am who I am, walking the path I walk, recalling what has brought me to where I am.
- As a teacher, I try to apply the methods that I have found most effective as a student, foremost of which is to treat students like capable thinkers in their own right (as John Lysaker and Debra Gwartney did with me). Often, they will naturally rise to meet the expectation. They can frequently be wiser than I or they realize.
- Many of my most rewarding teaching moments come after a class is over and a former student writes to thank me for making them think and not making them think what I want them to think.
- This is my pedagogy: to establish the possibility for each of us, myself included, to become ourselves.
WRITING AS CARING
- I try to meet my students where they are, person to person.
- I try to see in them the human first, the student second.
- I invite them to care about writing, trusting that if they care the writing will take care of itself. And I try to hold no grudges when they decline my invitation.
- When the student is ready, the teacher appears becomes When the desire appears, the effort follows.
- How do I do what I want to do? becomes How have others done something similar? Or looked at from the other direction: I like that becomes I want to try that. In this way, one takes the writer’s trajectory.
- I find myself thinking back again to how I learned how to write. No, that can’t be the right construction. I didn’t simple past learn to write. I past perfect have learned how to write, just as I am present perfect learning all the time how to write. It is this ongoingness that draws me to writing, this sense of slow growth toward the chance for still more growth. If writing came more easily, I’d have all the less reason to devote myself to it.
- I am on the journey I am on. My students are on the journeys they are on. When things go well, we find it advantageous to travel together for the time being.
- We are sometimes, all of us, in the same room.
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Scott F. Parker is the author of Notes to a Future Self and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion, among other books. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Assay, Brevity, The Believer, Inside Higher Ed, and Philosophy Now.