After years of teaching writing and literature my teaching philosophy might be summed up by the phrase, ‘We’re all in this together.’ Several years ago I was assigned to teach Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses to a group of extremely driven Advanced Placement students at New Trier High School. While I appreciate Faulkner and feel capable of teaching most novels with the possible exception of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I still haven’t read, Go Down, Moses had me stymied from nearly the first paragraph. There was a deadly combination of missing punctuation, unknown vocabulary, obscure allusions and elliptical action. In short, I was stumped and very wary of exposing this confusion to my class who had expressed healthy skepticism about a long-term sub who had shown up eager to help them forget their “real” teacher. I took that book apart. I read, reread, consulted numerous experts, found criticism and then admitted to the class that I was simply a heartbeat ahead of them. Students made discoveries that might have threatened someone who wanted to assert control in that classroom but I was delighted. We read that tough novel together and I think they may have worked harder than I did. But isn’t that the point? Certainly, the learner discovers true knowledge.

Nothing diverts me from my primary purpose, to teach my students what I know while helping them discover how much they know already. During a fiction writing class I taught at Columbia College a guest speaker, a Native American storyteller, looked around the room of eager faces and said, “Why do you need the Indian guy? You got stories!” And they did. I have taught creative writing to students and adults for close to twenty years and I still find myself amazed and moved by the importance of those stories. When I taught a group of adult Black women in the South Bronx we read A Letter from Birmingham Jail and each of them recounted an incident of racism so hurtful it took my breath away. These women didn’t cry. Their memories were journalistic in detail. They wrote narrative essays that recorded their experiences and left my class satisfied that their journeys had been authentically captured.

In the text I used to teach literacy across the curriculum, one chapter argues that the dimensions of rigorous instruction consist of engagement, authenticity, and transferability. I believe this to be true. Students need to be engaged in authentic material that also provides life long learning and the opportunity to be critical.

I have been asked over the years how I know my students so well, a question I find curious. It’s a selfish act to pay attention to the identity of your writing students because that identity determines so much. Identity will affect how they view the world, the point-of-view they choose, and the tone of their prose. It may also affect how much experience they bring to a writing program. It is not necessary to have fought in a war or given birth to children to imagine those rites of passage but knowing the lives and dreams of your students is part of being their writing teacher. It is significant that one of my current adult students is an experienced performance artist while another is a self-described housewife who battled breast cancer, raised three children, and held a distinguished academic position until her mentor threw her under the bus.

I look for clues as I listen and respond, helping each student find his or her story. What is clear is the significance of finding topics and exercises that encourage students to write from their knowledge base, their hearts and their imaginations. If these elements are engaged, the grammar will follow, the focus will exist, and the structure will be effective.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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