“I’d say just…write the damn story.”

Author Ryan Gattis and I, back a few years, talking about his book All Involved. We don’t generally use microphones to talk to each other when we get together these days.

This the thirteenth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of the first things I did on sabbatical was hit up my friend Ryan for some advice on the novel I’m trying to write. Well, that and to get some chorizo he’d been raving about. More on that later.

Early one morning in January, I drove the hour southwest from where I live, hit the 710, and shot across the bridge to San Pedro, a small part of me disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to reproduce the scene in Gone in 60 Seconds when Nic Cage—excuse me, Memphis Raines—jumps a line of cars in unbelievable fashion to take the last stolen car on his list to a guy who’d go on to play Destro in the G.I. Joe movie.  

My mild annoyance was put to rest, however, with the breakfast we got at a diner called Rex’s Café. The food was great, the conversation better.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Ryan is he wrote one of my favorite multi-voiced novels, All Involved. It is the fictional treatment of the King Riots in LA and a masterclass on carving one story from numerous perspectives.

That’s what I asked first: how did he navigate all those voices without them bleeding into and overwhelming each individual story? He paused, moved his napkin a couple inches on the table, and then looked at me. 

“I’d say just…write the damn story. I didn’t plan mine beyond knowing who my characters were. Felt like trying to know more would make the stories harder to get to.”

Ok, so maybe I was projecting my issues onto his process. I’ve been working on this thing going on eight years, so sometimes I feel a little like this:

We talked a little more about the craft of multiple voices, but more helpful was my living a little vicariously through where Ryan was at in his work at the time. One book in the pipeline, and idea for another brewing, some screenplays to write. A soccer match to watch when we got done that morning. Speaking of that coming book, it’s called The System and you should check it out.

It was more than vaguely comforting to see what’s possible, even if it’s not a probable outcome for me. In an odd way, his having numerous projects in the works made me feel like I might—someday—get one of mine out the door.

Oh, and about that chorizo. Yeah, you should make the trip to the ChoriMan’s laboratory kitchen tucked in a residential San Pedro neighborhood. Go buy a pound of the traditional red or the maple habanero or grab one of the burritos they’re selling that day. It is all phenomenal.

When it comes to food, Ryan has yet to steer me wrong. Pretty solid with the writing advice too.

Books — Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro

Dean Nelson, Harper Perennial (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Nelson’s website here.

Being a writer means I have friends who are also writers. Working for years in three different forms means those writer friends are a diverse group. As such, my reading list might seem a little weird to people who are more married to a particular form or expression.

Take, for instance, my friend Dean Nelson. A journalist and one of the best interviewers I’ve met, he and I go back to my teen years and were colleagues in the same department for four years. We are both irreverent and caring in equal measure, which means we are trouble when we find ourselves in the same room.

So, when his book Talk to Me came out the summer of my sabbatical, I was stoked to read it. Ostensibly a primer on how to interview others, I had a suspicion that Dean would be getting at more than just good journalistic practice. 

I was not incorrect.

Talk to Me is, of course, a useful professional aid, making plain the ways that one can build or burn even the best interview situations. And, Dean manages to find the proper balance of useful, direct craft advice and interesting anecdotal illustrations that underscore rather than overwhelm the technical information people came for, a balance so many writing guides fail to achieve. 

It’s also a sneaky memoir of a guy who’s spent a life learning how to listen, more in the vein of Francis Flaherty’s The Elements of Story than Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. And anyone who knows Dean knows he’s got stories worth being interviewed about himself, stories he opens up on the pages here.

But the book is just as much a reminder that listening with intent rather than speaking with authority is a crucial human skill, one I fear we are losing in our hyper-polarized and self-segregated digital present. In many ways, it’s a call to push past replacing interactions with suppositions to discover what lies beyond our assumptions about others.

“Paradox is always worth exploring, in my opinion, because it shows that human beings are never entirely this way or that way. Every fundamentalist has his caveat. Every liberal has a conservative exception” (25).

And, when confronted with the paradox, Dean’s advice is a very sound endorsement of quelling our knee-jerk need to frame those contradictions by talking over the person in whom we find them. Rather, the real work is maintaining a posture of listening as a form of accountability for both ourselves and others.

“Silence is part of the grammar of an interview….Using silence means you are telling your source that you can wait him out. It tells him that silence isn’t an answer, and he’s not going to get out of answering…” (189, 191). 

It’s of note here to recall that meditation is so often silent and the learning it generates paradoxical to the noisy confines of a world of people trying to speak their truth into larger existence. Maybe that’s the message here as well.

Imaginative Teaching, considerable planning

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

This the eighth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer. Note: Just over two months ago, my co-editors and I submitted the full manuscript of the book described below. It will be out in the spring of 2021.

My sabbatical began, not with writing the fiction that would define the time away, but with two academic projects. For specifics on the first, check out next Wednesday’s post. The larger of the two, however, stretched across the entire time I was away and is still in progress as I write this.

But that is excellent news as I am under contract and co-editing my third collection for Bloomsbury Academic, a new and exciting take on teaching creative writing through and beyond all of the perceived limitations to doing so at the secondary level.

The book is called Imaginative Teaching and puts the ideas of creative writing theorists and secondary teachers in conversation over a long form for, really, the first time. To say I’m excited would be an understatement given I’ve taught at both levels and truly believe in the power of creative writing in inspiring the most important forms of learning we need to do as humans.

To say I was not excited by the back and forth of the proposal process and how often I was balancing it and my attempts to write my novel in the time I’d been given is also very, very true. The outcome—a contract and firm publication schedule—is, of course, what I’d hoped for.

But the amount of revisions and response in the process of working our way from proposal to contract made for some tricky maneuvers on the narrow surface of the time-management balance beam.

Given that this is not my first time through the process, in general and with Bloomsbury, this was not new or surprising. But against the backdrop of my “wide open” sabbatical calendar, it felt so much more restrictive than it had in the past, something so counterintuitive it’s hard to type it without feeling like I’m whining.

But, just as excitement or love can expand to consume the attention of the person experiencing them, so too it is with work regardless of the busyness surrounding it.

And somehow, I feel like that’s an important lesson. There is no such thing as free time when that freedom is contingent on seeing it as such. 

Maybe free time, like meaning, is more a by-product of our choices along the way and less an item we can place on the calendar and access when we arrive at the prescribed time.

Books — Little Faith

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Little Faith

Nikolas Butler, Ecco (2019) 

Find the book here. Check out Butler’s website here.

I read Nickolas Butler’s Little Faith on the advice of my friend Chris, who suggests books from time to time and is always on the money with what he thinks I’ll resonate with. In specific, there are three elements of this book that really align with what I try to create in my own work. 

First, this is what I would refer to as a quiet narrative. It slowly burrows into the lives of a retired couple living in rural northern Wisconsin who are trying to hold onto their tenuous relationships, primarily with their adopted daughter and grandson, around whom their lives increasingly revolve. Buried in the core of all of this is the loss that reformed their lives in the first place. 

“The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne the burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome. It blots the sun, steals every color, snuffs out any music—it dissolves marriages like acid, bleeds out happiness and leaves in its wake nothing but gray despair.

“No one knew this better than Lyle and Peg…” (291).

This loss is what every moment is reflected against for the entirety of the novel, deepening even the casual gestures of connection with their community while adding weight to every slight and rejection of human connection.

The second facet I gravitate to in this narrative is the way in which it interrogates fairly the damage bad religious practices can inflict and also the ways in which faith is pervasive in the face of it all. Butler captures this in a spot-on depiction of a corner of Evangelical culture ripe for becoming a cult of personality reconstituting the object of its belief around a charismatic pastor.

Rather than just depict faith this singular way, however, Butler counterpoints what might be seen as an easy representation of bad church culture with Lyle’s relationship with his life-long friend and now Lutheran pastor Charlie, who listens to jazz over bourbon, shepherds a slowly dying congregation of stoic Midwestern believers, and dispenses quiet, worldly wise advice when Lyle feels like he might be losing his ability to believe.

The contrast between the two is necessary in any depiction of faith because, counter the American desire to overwrite one cultural narrative on any diverse community, religious practices and expressions of faith are numerous and divergent and seeing them as such matters.

And finally, I love stories built around decisions characters make that have clear necessity but don’t discount the costs they also carry. In this case, Lyle decides to take his grandson, who is gravely ill and being denied medical care by the cult his mother has joined, by physical force. The decision may have saved the boy’s life, but it also likely ended his relationship with his daughter. 

In sum, this book is a meditation on loss and love and what people hold closest when life inevitably begins to strip the rest away. And it is just so good.

Another former student, another first book

This book is gorgeous and nails every one of the characters it centers on the page. You can find it here.

This the seventh installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Around the time I was finishing up the edits on Black Was Not a Label, I received a cryptic message from Heidi, another student who was in the same Master’s cohort as Kathryn. It went something like this: 

I have some news to tell you soon. It’s very exciting.

Heidi is another of those former students who I worked with both as an undergraduate and as a grad student. She is, also, a walking idea factory with interests in everything from music (check out her EP here) to podcasting (two different going concerns you can sample here and here) to youth and musical theater (look no further than her musical version of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces that’s in the works) to poetry (which she doles out on her socials) to academic writing.

And, of course, there’s the fiction I’ve worked on with her for several years now, culminating in serving as her committee chair for her creative capstone at the end of the Masters process.

That project was a collection of four short stories that showed astonishing breadth without losing connection with each other. The pieces, all set against the backdrop of coming of age in Maui in the early 21st century, ranged from the grittiest of realities to unflinching questions of the what lies just beyond our human understanding of reality on the spiritual plane.

The complexity of these stories is only increased by the fact that all are told by characters who exist in a truly narrow liminal space in Hawaiian culture: the white island resident who isn’t a tourist but will also never be a native of the place. Walking that razor’s edge as a writer—where one wrong step could lead to further erasure or co-opting of the Hawaiian—is a delicate balance and one that a younger writer might, understandably, have struggled with.

Heidi, on the other hand, devoted herself to the work and to rendering full characters who live, grow, and change in the light of all those same cultural pressures. The result was a four-story cycle that went on to be published in each of its parts.

After finishing her degree, she kept working, looking for a place that would give a home to her collection. And then her follow up message: the manuscript won the Heritage Prize: the Great Story Project contest and with it publication. 

Now working under the title of The Sacred Art of Trespassing Barefoot, Heidi’s book is in the hands of an audience who have no idea how challenging and moving and powerful what they’re about to read truly is. Oh, and she’s gearing up to move all the way across the country for the next step in her development, and MFA.

I can’t wait to get my copy signed and talk shop with the author herself next time she’s in town.  

Books — Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

Trent Hergenrader, Bloomsbury Academic (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Hergenrader’s website here. And you can find the books we edited together with our friend Joe here and here.

Few ideas have influenced my creative writing instruction around the concept of setting more than those that have come in conversation with my friend and long-time co-editor Trent. Specifically, he is the number one apologist of the effectiveness of collaborative world building as an element of teaching and nurturing the creative process of writers at all levels.

A little backstory: when we were grad students together, Trent took a huge risk—at least in the eyes of the norm core English department establishment—and tied his critical studies to elements of RPG and video game theory.

Then he convinced the powers-that-be of course assignment to allow him to pilot what I would call a radical departure from the traditional creative writing course set up, rolling out a worldbuilding-based course that led his students creating a sprawling, post-apocalyptic version of Milwaukee replete with rules, characters, context, and guiding world principles from which thousands of stories could be written. 

In short, he did what good teachers do: he made the normal strange and the strange a way back to what his students thought they knew. And, in that class, was the seed that became his book Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers. Having seen this idea develop almost since its inception, it was really fun to tear into it while away on sabbatical.

Part teaching manual, part transmedia universe theory, and part idea generator for creating richer, deeper worlds for stories and campaigns alike, Trent’s book is a practical balance of philosophical notions of how settings operate and pragmatic explorations of how to get the most out of hashing out the rules of an environment shared by a writer and her audience or a group of gamers gathered to play Dungeons & Dragons complete with a worldbuilding card deck.

Bigger, though, he makes the case for how immensely helpful it is to re-conceive preparing to tell new stories in this way:   

“Imagine the collaborative worldbuilding process as the creation of an enormous story-generating machine. In this view, the act of worldbuilding is distinct and separate from conventional storytelling” (6).

And, along with being a helpful guide to opening up the creative process, the text also helps readers consider how the limitations to expressing their own worlds most effectively might lie within their own assumptions.

“Worlds are deceptively complex and we must be aware that our natural inclination is to generalize lived experiences….How we distinguish between worlds, what we identify as the rules of different worlds, and how social forces operate in a given world are all matters of importance” (16).

That’s why I suggest this book to my students; it benefits their art and their character in ways they probably aren’t expecting when they fold back the cover.

I’m editing a book? I’m editing a book.

In many ways, I watched this book grow up. And now that it’s out, it should be on your shelves. Find it here and read it as soon as you can. It matters that much.

This the sixth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

As I’ve noted in my post last Wednesday, there were a couple of major projects I’d not planned on doing that appeared out of the sabbatical ether, one of which is very special to me. 

So often in my role as a professor of writing, I am in the position of helping younger writers launch big projects they will most likely complete well after they’ve finished school, if they ever find an end to those projects at all. Well after they are no longer my student or someone I see regularly.

These ideas are usually rough, vastly more expansive than any one story or even book can effectively express, and often not even actually the project the writer wants to tackle in the end.

Shorter: I’m often helping with the heaviest lifting in the writing process, the winnowing.

Sometimes, however, writers come to me with a concept that is ready to press forward immediately; a project with a sense of itself; a message in need of an audience as much as an editor or creative consultant. 

Such was the case with Kathryn’s work. When she was a senior in our undergraduate program and a member of my advanced creative writing class, she stopped by my podium on the way out one evening and asked if I would read an essay of hers that had recently been published. I knew her as an avid reader and, primarily, as an author of science fiction, so I was curious to see what she cared about in nonfiction.

Note: please visit her author site, Speak the Write Language, and find her publication list. She’s prolific, gifted in all phases of writing, and a voice you should hear from.

So, of course I said yes, read it a couple days later, and immediately told her it was fantastic. Because it was, and is, as you will see in the version that made it into her book. I also told Kathryn that it felt like she had more to say in essay form.

And then the term ended and Kathryn graduated and for a while we touched base at church from time to time, not really finding space to talk about her essays in any substantive form. A couple years later, she ended up back in my classroom—this time in the M.A. program—and she told me that she had, indeed, more to say. Had done a lot of growing. Needed to respond to the first essay she’d shown me because she didn’t see the world in quite the way she did back then.

She asked if I would chair her capstone committee and work with her on creating a collection of essays on growing increasingly aware of what it is to be black and a woman in an America that is not and may never be capable of becoming post-racial. 

Six months of work and what at the time seemed like four-ish essays later, the infant version of what would become Black Was Not a Label  came into being. It was, even in its still-developing form at the time, stunning. An associate dean who reads all the graduate projects before they are approved pulled me aside at an end of the year event and said, “These are stories that people need to read.”

I agreed and encouraged Kat think about expanding the collection by a few more essays and then look for a publisher. It was that good. Then she graduated. Continued working as a freelance writer. Took an internship at a local publisher to consider a job in the industry. Submitted a couple places.

You know, generally lived the life of an emerging writer with all its potentials and frustrations. 

Then came the ebullient message. A new publisher had read her manuscript. Had offered a contract. Had allowed her input on who should get to help prep the book for publication. And Kathryn thought of me.

I said yes, slid a couple projects to the side (one likely permanently) and jumped in. The work was in the small matters. The turns of phrase. The transitions from idea to idea. The order of the pieces toward a more cohesive pathway that leads to a singular read of the many (now almost eleven) parts. 

Part editor, part encourager, I spent the summer working the book through with her, reminding her over and over that these were, indeed, stories y’all need to hear. Stories she needed to tell.

Kathryn and I at her book launch, an event I was honored to help facilitate.

In August, when my part of the work was done, I took one last pass over the document, reading it as part of the audience for the first time. Then I wrote my editor’s note that is now included the book. It seems a fitting way to close this post. 

This is book of echoes, at once a path through a pain-shrouded past and a map toward a future where healing is possible. But first, as Kathryn tells both versions of herself in “Erasure,” we must look at what we have been too afraid to examine. We must slow down and consider the wounds, opened and reopened for centuries, that create the world where these words were framed and formed. We must listen with no other intent but to grieve and allow that sadness to reshape us.

There was a moment in the editing process when, like stopping on a long hike to look back on the expanse of trail one has covered, I paused to reflect on the scope of the work being done in these pages. Rather, I was brought up short by these lines:

“…but this is not helplessness. It is weight. I sit constant beneath the knowledge that there is little to be done—that to try would be to strain against centuries upon centuries of strivings turned to death turned to mourning turned to moaning ghosts hurling their laments from the broken boughs of ancient trees.”

Black Was Not a Label is a reckoning of the most intimate nature, one that demands—gently but persistently—to be read more than once. The first passage through these lines is personal, a shared space between you and the author’s experiences. But the return trip is where you will begin to hear the call and response of these separate passages now collected as one volume. Pay attention to the way these words move like spirits to connect the weight and strain of our past to move through soul-deep hurt toward a hope that remains even still.   

Books — House of Broken Angels

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea, Back Bay Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Urrea’s website here.

I’ve been a fan of Luis Urrea‘s work since someone handed me his book Beside the Lake of Sleeping Children almost a decade ago. His prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is so spare and precise without losing its emotional energy.

Urrea has a way of using the sequence of his details to carry the sense of a moment, whether in scene or dialogue, that is powerful in its unassuming form. He leaves the reader to sit with what’s what’s just been revealed on the page and also prompts us to explore what they make of where it takes us off of it. The effect allows his stories to feel strangely familiar even when the circumstances are not.

This is a key to the deeply moving story at the core of his novel The House of Broken Angels, a multi-perspective rumination on family and belonging and the endings that inevitably follow beginnings.

The basic premise of the book revolves around the funeral of Big Angel’s mother and the last birthday party he will ever have, both of which happen within a few days of each other. The two events bring Angel’s extended family together at his East County San Diego home where all of them wrestle with where life has taken them and how it will, inevitably, give way to something else in death.

Swirling around Big Angel—who until his cancer became advanced was the loud, decision-making patriarch of the clan—his children and siblings try to honor his wishes for one more party and chance at reconciliation for all the ways life has estranged and bound them together at the same time.

In everyone else, the patterns of life and family unwind in new generations while the members of Angel’s ponder slipping into the roles of the elderly, some clinging to their youth while others succumb to the persistent erosions of time. This reminded me quite a bit of the dynamic of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy  in which the characters who attend the titular Billy’s wake construct themselves in the same moments they build an increasingly complex portrait of him. 

And in it all, Big Angel tries to understand what he is about to give up in death; to evaluate whether or not he has truly lived and lived well. This rumination ends in a single moment when he is able, in his weakened way, to act one last time as the father figure so many in the family still needed.

“And that was it for Big Angel. The string was cut. He felt and saw sparks rise around him. Now he knew why he was not dead yet. The sparks whirled. He thought he had stayed alive to enjoy his own wake. He thought he was still alive to make amends. He thought he was still alive to try one last hour to unite his family. But now he knew. What a pretty little tornado of light” (306).

The House of Broken Angels, then, is a novel about the living we do when we know that dying will come, not in the abstract but the tangible. And in this space, Urrea challenges readers to ask the same questions of themselves they find his characters asking.

This, I believe, is a gift.

One project fails, another begins

This the fifth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

I had a few projects I hoped would last through the entirety of my entire time out of the classroom that fell away over the sabbatical. Some of that change happened because unexpected opportunities popped up for me at various points along the way. Other projects just felt less important once I got into the rhythm of working on my novel first and everything else second. And a couple of projects morphed into something else entirely.

One such project was a series of blog posts I called Top Shots, a planned weekly roundup of some pictures I took on my phone simply to slow myself down and pay attention to the physical world in images the way I tend to in my head with words.

And for a while, I did just that, as you can see in the pictures below.

You may recognize this picture from the front page of my blog. This is facing west toward Mission Bay in the end, the sun piercing the clouds in the same moments a long bout of depression lifted for me.

San Diego’s 163 Freeway, in a rare moment of open road.

The view from Sunset Cliffs. To think, I used to drive past this view almost daily on the way home from work.

Street art meets commerce on University in Hillcrest.

But, as Frost put it, way lead on to way and I just couldn’t find the space for the space I was trying to make there. 

To say this was frustrating is an understatement, even as the project was supposed to be light and really just for me. But, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I really don’t have an off-switch for feeling bad about letting projects go. Even the light ones.

Sometime in the summer, as I grudgingly started thinking about going back to the classroom, it occurred to me that I had not been back to the Top Shots well in some time and I started scrolling my Instagram feed for shots I might include in a new post. It was only at this moment that I realized what the issue was.

I was platforming these pictures on the wrong medium. Fifteen minutes later, I had created an author account on IG with the same handle as my Twitter account and have since been posting all my writing-related content there, including what I might have called Top Shots before. It’s been really helpful.

Something about posting things one at a time as they come to me—Bird by Bird-style—just makes more sense. Maybe it will for you too. Give the account a look and a follow either here or via the widget at the bottom of the page.

20-15-10

Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash

I filed grades for my last class of the year this past Friday and it occurred to me that this is a season of professional round numbers for me. 

The end of that summer course marks the completion of my 10th year as a full-time professor of writing, my 15th teaching in higher education, and my 20th as an educator. 

Not bad for a job I initially avoided and then took on as a two-year stop-gap to “see what I actually wanted to do” after I left daily journalism. 

Before you get the wrong impression, this is more a commentary on how my not seeing the significance of this year was the result of a very different realization. I’ll save the sloppy nostalgic tour of my career for 30-25-20.

I really didn’t consider the numeric synergy of this year until just before it ended. Can’t imagine what I was so preoccupied with...

What I think I have felt most in the past few months is the strain of standing in the middle of two forces the pandemic has laid bare in education. That fault line runs directly under the intersection of what I appreciate most and least about my job.

The reason I love teaching—like all good teachers I know—is the students. It’s a cliched answer because is so consistently true. 

Over the years, I have worked with now thousands (in the plural) of students from elementary kids to doctoral candidates. And I don’t teach large seminars at the college level, so when I say I’ve worked with them, I really have. I have mentored writers, coached basketball players and runners, spent weekends and summers helping some students remediate their grades and others get their books ready for publication. 

The headaches in all of this are numerous, but the sense of purpose I gain from helping people engage their work and their lives in ways that push them toward expecting more of themselves is why I do this. 

I guess my motivations are pretty basic: tending their growth is what makes me happy. It’s also a site of much learning on my part.

At the same time, the charge toward re-opening schools in the fall despite many strong reasons to resist such plans highlights the thing I can’t find a way to reconcile about my profession. 

We’ve made schools a business and it’s wrecked them. And in the process, teachers from Kindergarten to graduate studies have been saddled with duties and expectations that take us from the things we should be focused on: teaching students and partnering with them in the ways they most need.

I know of no other profession that caters more to the desires of people who come from outside of it with no expertise in what makes it work best. Everybody went to school, which apparently makes them an expert, or so the tone of their advice would seem to indicate. 

And I get it: there are many stories of schools from tiny districts to large universities failing at their charter. But where that should mean correcting via best practices and the research that exists on the subject, American schools have done what all American institutions do: they’ve applied the thinking of corporate efficiency and capitalistic incentives through resource scarcity to look for ways to “improve” education. 

Only to achieve the opposite effect. 

We defund higher education. We saddle students with crushing debt. We make teachers perform administrative duties while increasing administrative bloat at every turn. We increase class sizes and demand more work from teachers already overloaded. We pay less and expect more. 

We test students into the ground, measuring abstract notions of “development” and “performance” that tell us little more than how well the system was designed to embrace or erase where those students come from. 

We spend on campus police and stadiums while cutting back on counselors and support staff. We say we offer a free education in our country without really counting the costs associated with it. 

We fund schools by their zip code, thus ensuring those in the wealthiest neighborhoods remain one more source of privilege for the minority of students who can attend them. 

And in all of this, we prefer only the stories of the exceptional educators. The ones who teach math in the inner city and suffer a heart attack from the stress. The ones who help students find their own voice in writing, showing their dedication by going bankrupt in the process. The ones who seem heroic by simply learning that it takes more than good intentions to be a good teacher and it was never their job to save these kids in the first place. 

We love these teachers because they feed the narrative of exceptionalism. They are also myths. 

The reason I love teaching doesn’t come with a casting announcement for who will play me in the movie version of my time in the classroom (though we all know it will be Liev Schreiber). It doesn’t carry cash incentives like selling steak knives. And in most cases, it does not come with the overt recognition of the people around me.

It’s the small moments when students allow us in enough to learn that they are not destined to fail. That they are not invisible. That they are, in fact, capable of more than people have given them credit for, themselves included. 

Good teachers make a life’s study of how they can become more human and approachable rather than how they can be more “rigorous” (generally a euphemism for how they can make their preferred style of learning the definition of difficulty in the classroom). 

They train for seeing the smallest signs of growth or openness and they press into them rather than seeking to flatten out all the students into one homogeneous set drones who can perform equally under the same expectations. 

They don’t work at being popular so much as trustworthy and fair. And they don’t care as much about grades as they do about gradual improvement, even when the system pushes them—hard—to do just the opposite. 

And that’s what hit me about my workiversary. I didn’t see it coming because I’m perpetually too busy with that course of study. I’m not perfect. Hell, I’m not even exceptional. 

I’m merely reaching for effective. That’s enough, contrary to what the “experts” in everything other than education contend.