I am very much looking forward to Donald Hall’s reading at the University of Michigan on Dec. 1st.
I’ve been reading his memoir Unpacking the Boxes and want to share what he wrote about teaching composition at the University of Michigan.
When I took the Michigan job, I made it a condition that I teach no creative writing. Every term the department gave me a section of freshman composition. It is the hardest class to teach. Twenty students are twenty different sets of difficulty and the difficulty is only partly with writing. My freshmen were away from home for the first time – few came from boarding schools – and struggled with loneliness and liberty. In their essays they expressed or evaded their confusions. Language explains us to ourselves and conceals us from ourselves. Teaching prose style became exploration of the psyche, and I went home from conferences and office hours vibrating with the discomfort and distress of my composition students. (There were contrary elations. When a boy from a northern town suddenly brightens up and understands, or a girl from a high school in suburban Detroit takes first, the hard class becomes satisfying.) Eventually debilitated by teaching composition, I volunteered to teach creative writing. To my surprise I liked it – one class a year, ten or twelve people. I could choose the students after checking out their work, and take only those with some facility.
Thanks, Donald Hall. I’ll try to remember these lines the next time someone says, “Oh, you just teach composition?”
Wordarrangement's Blog 