A version of this piece was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education to coordinate with the publication of Maps of the Imagination.

On Teaching Writing

By Peter Turchi

This is a tale about being lost, and finding a way, and then deciding to get lost again.

Long, long ago, on the verge of graduating from college, full of desire and naiveté, I accepted a Graduate Assistantship in Teaching from the University of Arizona 1) thinking that meant I was going to assist a teacher and 2) not knowing Tucson, Arizona, is in a desert. My excuses? I grew up on the East Coast, where deserts existed only in black and white movies; and despite my staggering ignorance, one thing I knew was that I was no teacher. I was a student; I had applied to the university to study.

To their credit, the people in charge of such things at the University assumed, or had learned by experience, that many of my fellow GATs would be as lost as I was. They oriented us: pointed us all in one direction. They told us our goal (to teach Freshman Composition) and how to reach it. We were given the textbooks, the essays to assign, and the standards by which to grade those essays; we were even given detailed syllabi. They provided us, and we, in turn, provided our students, something very much like what the counter clerks at AAA make for their customers: a bound set of strip maps showing the precise route from point A to point Z, with every turn marked.

Considering what the people responsible for Composition were given to work with—dozens of (mostly) young men and women, the majority with not 5 minutes experience in front of a classroom, asked to drag, poke, and prod thousands of first year students through the required writing sequence—the TripTik approach to teaching had some merit. I know at least a dozen of that year’s GATs who are still teaching, more than two decades later, and I’m prepared to admit that our surviving that first year might very well have had something to do with the level of detail in the instruction we were given.

Strip maps have a long and honorable lineage. They were put to use famously by John Ogilby, a former dance instructor, when he set out to make the first road atlas of Great Britain. He knew the people using roads were interested primarily in how to get from place to place. But while we teachers are sometimes destination-oriented, we are often as interested, if not more interested, in how we get there. We ponder, How can this material be communicated most clearly and effectively? Even as GATs we recognized that, in order to stay sane, we needed to find a) the relationship between what we were required to teach and the sort of reading and writing we loved, and b) a way to convey that passionate interest to our students.

That is why, as practical as that teaching TripTik may have been, in order to progress in the profession we had to throw it out the window. Teaching by strict adherence to someone else’s plan is like dancing by stepping on the yellow footprints mapped out on the studio floor: it isn’t dancing at all, but an imitation of dancing. It’s mechanical, uninspired, painful to watch and awkward to do. It’s a start, but needs to be brought to life in ways that can’t be dictated.

In education we talk about a course of study. According to no particular dictionary, a course is a channel, like the course of a stream; a path or route, like a golf course; or a habitual, common, and/or logical way of proceeding, as when we say “of course.” Students sign up for a course expecting to be taken somewhere useful, interesting or, ideally, both. Exactly what they learn, and how they learn it, is not, often, their primary concern. They trust us to understand what they need to know and how, after 8 or 12 or 14 weeks, they will come to know it. They get on the bus and trust us to drive.

The problem comes when the “course” is so deep and frequently traveled that it’s more rut than route, more gutter than way to get there. The ultimate liberation from a dictated itinerary came, for me, at a community college that might as well go unnamed. I was invited to propose any course I liked, with the understanding that, if enough students were willing to pay to enroll in it, I had a job. This, we all know, is a dangerous practice, one that can lead to classes such as “Individual and Community: An Investigation of Gilligan’s Island,” and “A Survey of World Beers: Part 3.” But I proposed classes I had dreamed of teaching, classes no one, as of then, had let me teach: “Great American Short Stories,” “Great American Novels,” “Great Contemporary Fiction,” (“Great” being my concession to the need to sell the class), etc. The courses had no prerequisites, and they led to no major or degree. No one told me which stories or novels to teach, and no one particularly cared. So I taught what I loved, and students came along for the ride.

Here’s my confession: Although I was driving the bus, I had no idea where I was going. I knew the major landmarks and points of interest—the texts I had chosen—but not what I was going to say about them, or whether the 12 weeks we had together would add up to anything more than a reading group. And so I prepared each week knowing that when I stepped into the room on Wednesday nights, my (adult) students were likely to demand answers to questions their younger counterparts often thought of, but rarely dared to ask: “What does this mean?” “Why did we have to read it?” “What makes it ‘Great’?” A dozen or twenty backseat drivers insisted that I defend the route I had chosen, the stops we made. Some nights (Lolita and Moby-Dick come to mind) the room held a distinct air of mutiny.

While I don’t endorse such a cavalier approach to curricula, those students and others like them taught me that the demand for justification created justification. Both the questions students asked and the questions I feared they would ask played crucial roles in defining the course—not the course that had been planned (which was hardly more than a notion), but the course we made, together. What we reached wasn’t an imposed destination but a way to see relationships among the texts, the ideas they contained, and the choices their authors had made—the result of close reading and thoughtful discussion.

For the past 11 years I have had the extraordinary luxury of teaching fiction writing in a low-residency MFA program. I call it a luxury not because the work is easy or overpaid, but because ours is, essentially, a tutorial program, one in which each faculty member works with a very few students. This offers my colleagues and me the luxury of time, which in turn allows for tremendous individual attention. We aren’t driving a bus, or even a taxi; we’re walking alongside our students.

While there are specific requirements for the degree, and for what has to be accomplished in any given semester, there are no syllabi; there isn’t a single required text. Instead, we have what we call a “Semester Project Study Plan,” which consists of two sheets of blank paper. Terra incognita. At the 10-day residency that starts every semester, my colleagues and I meet with each student we’ll be working with for the months ahead, and together we map out a plausible course on those blank pages. The student has ideas about where she should go: what she should write, what aspects of craft she should study, and what she should read to learn them. We have our own ideas about what she needs to learn, what she might read. We tailor the journey to this particular student at this particular time. We change direction as often as seems useful, or necessary.

Can this happen in more typical classroom teaching? Of course it can—and does, in good classes in every discipline and at every level. The larger the numbers, though, the harder it is; such individual instruction requires tremendous amounts of time, energy, and devotion, which is why all of us who have tried to do it praise the great classroom teachers, from pre-school to grad school.

Truly guiding a student involves listening, responding, and revising—which is to say, it requires us to allow ourselves to be led. To risk diverting from the course we proposed—to change direction, backtrack, and even, occasionally, acknowledge that we find ourselves in unknown territory—is to risk yielding some of our authority. Happily, most students appreciate it when we admit that we, too, are voyagers. They respond enthusiastically when we tell them, “Let’s not worry so much about being finished, about having all the answers; let’s ask more questions.”

This philosophy affords us two great pleasures. The first is that we can, with sincerity and good will, tell our students and colleagues to get lost. The second, and longer-lasting, is that when we respond to our students’ interests, observations, and enthusiasm, whatever course we follow is less likely to be a march down a well-worn road, more likely to be an opportunity for adventure and discovery, for guide and guided alike.