I read an essay today about how teachers teach. It wasn't any new revelation but rather a good reminder that no matter what we're doing, we are teaching. Either by good example or bad example, we are teaching. Either directly or indirectly, we're teaching.
I learned something really important in the creative writing course that I was in this semester. It had nothing to do with syntax, anapests, or synecdoche. It wasn't something on the syllabus, nor was it something that was taught directly.
Here's what it comes down to: excellence matters, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Like encouragement. Like self-expression. Like getting hidden hurts down on paper once and for all. Maybe even for the first time.
It was something I saw in action: such generous responses to everyone's work. For some people, it might have been the first time they ventured to write what they knew from their life and what they felt in their heart and then the agony of having to share it with the whole class. And be "marked" on it--have some value assigned to it.
The value for most of us was being able to say what we had to say. Getting it out. It's liberating, and to have such tentative steps met with uplifting hands and encouraging words is something that can't be measured.
It is, in fact, invaluable.
So thanks to our fearless instructor, Donna Kane, and to all those who shared some secret part of their souls in both the writing and in the comments on others' writing. It was a humbling experience.
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