SmArts

May 12-18, 2014

Learning the value of teaching

By Molly Rector

At the end of my first year of this MFA program, I am thinking about poetry and about teaching. I spent the last week traveling to elementary schools in Jonesboro and in the tiny town of Hartman, where I worked with other writers to teach poetry to kids in grades three through six. I noticed, in Hartman, how much more earnestly the third-graders seemed in their writing, than did a majority of the sixth-graders, who (with the exception of a few) seemed to wholeheartedly reject the act of writing poetry. I imagine this had something to do with being the oldest, with being somehow very different from the younger kids in the school (isn't this the rationale for the creation of middle schools, which take sixth-grade out of elementary?). 

I'm not sure I've yet figured out how to teach kids (this includes my college freshmen) how to believe in the value of writing, particularly in the value of creative writing. Of course it's more difficult in the span of a short day-trip like the ones we take to the elementary schools, but I wonder, too, how much my self-conscious students verging on adulthood really take away from my class about the value of writing, itself. Of course, this means that I find myself constantly trying to square myself with what I really believe about why writing is important.

I find myself wondering, too, if there's something in particular about creative fields that makes those in them want to promote them in these ways. Do businesspeople want everyone to be in business? I'm certain than politicians don't want everyone to be politicians, that basketball players don't want everyone to be basketball players. Or perhaps what I find myself wondering is whether or not I actually want everyone to be a writer – I certainly think everyone could benefit from the practice of writing (and not just writing to communicate – creative writing), but perhaps congresspeople and soccer coaches feel this way about their respective fields, too. 

What I am sure of is that there was a group of boys in Hartman's sixth-grade class who didn't want, or couldn't think how, to write a poem based on a prompt. Working closely with one of them to write about an ice storm, I saw something beginning to happen for him – something (an understanding of metaphor?) starting to open up. I have no way of knowing if he will continue toward that understanding, but it's part of what has me thinking, now, about poetry and teaching, coming to believe in the value of these pursuits.