It’s Finals Week at Pioneer High School, which means we’ve reached the halfway point of the school year - a good time to reflect on how things have gone so far. This is an important process to undertake because it’s tempting to keep my head down and plow forward, to allow the momentum of the year to claim me and keep me moving. After all, there’ll be plenty of time to reflect come mid-June, right?

If I succumb to that temptation though, I could potentially be doing my second-semester students a huge disservice. Don’t I owe it to my upcoming classes to determine whether I need to attempt mid-course corrections? Additionally, isn’t picking my head up and looking around exactly what I claim to be one of the core principles of strong writing? Don’t I tell my students nearly every week, this is what writers do, they slow down the world. They take a second look and a third?

What kind of writing teacher would I be if I didn’t slow down midway and take a second look at my teaching, try to figure out how I’m doing?

On the other hand, I don’t want to paralyze myself. I’ve got 115 Creative Writing portfolios to read and evaluate over the next seven days, at approximately 30 minutes per portfolio. If I slow down too much, that task will feel insurmountable and I’ll flounder in a torrent of poems and stories. There’s something to be said for plodding forward sans regret.

I do want to reflect, but I can’t just stop and reassess everything. There simply isn’t time. Rather than nit-picking every nuance, it makes sense to focus on just a handful key elements of my teaching. In fact, to be honest, if I can pause long enough to gauge how I’ve been doing in even one significant area, that might be the best I can reasonably hope for.

Let me turn, then, to what I think is the most important thing I learned about teaching writing over the course of the two-year low-residency MFA program I completed last summer. What I came to understand after working closely with a quartet of mentors, was that the most effective writing instruction I received occurred when I felt the instructor wasn’t trying to mold my writing to look like his or hers, but was instead trying to figure out what I was after in my own work and how he or she could help me get there. That idea might sound obvious, but in fact, it’s fairly radical because it runs counter-intuitive to how the teacher-student relationship generally functions. We tend to operate under the assumption that we teachers are experts, and that when a flood of student papers arrives at our desks, our job is to correct them, to show students how they can fix what they’re doing wrong. Hence, we unsheathe our red pens and rubrics and we scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch, and we hope our students will integrate our admonitions into their future attempts and thereby improve, thus rendering the next flood of papers less painful to read.

The problem with that approach is that writing isn’t like obeying traffic signals. It’s not that expertise doesn’t matter, but the more one learns about writing, the more one also comes to understand there isn’t one right way to do it. Hemingway, after all, couldn’t be more different than Nabokov. Sappho and Sapphire might address some common themes, but they also seem like they might have come from entirely different planets.

In the current issue of the academic trade publication, English Journal, Maja Wilson, a former high school teacher in Michigan, creates an analogy to illustrate this point by telling the story of a mid-wife who attends the home-birth of an Amish woman. As the woman went into her heaviest stages of labor, she crawled on her knees beneath her kitchen table. Rather than demand the woman get out from under the table and onto a bed (or into a hospital), the mid-wife followed the woman under the table and helped her push from there. Minutes later, the baby was born healthy.

Wilson argues that writing teachers also need to follow their students wherever their muses are leading them, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of style and form. It doesn’t matter if we, as instructors, are comfortable. What matters - if we want our students to birth vibrant art - is that we prepare ourselves to follow our students into whatever recesses they may lead us and we assist them in their searches. Our most effective role is not to lead and correct, but to follow and assist.

That’s an argument that makes a lot of teachers squeamish. Me too. It’s scary to give up our positions as field generals, our mapping of the terrain we think is suitable for exploration. Yet I know from my own experiences as a student, that it’s the mentors who followed and assisted me from whom I learned the most, and with whom I was able to push myself the furthest. In practical terms, that means instead of telling my students what to do, I must ask more questions. I must keep searching for the questions that will help them find their own way, even when they don’t understand that when they’re wandering around - seemingly aimlessly - a way is, in fact, what they’re looking for.

This manner of teaching has been a difficult adjustment. I have to listen more intently. I have to open my mind to possibilities I don’t even know exist. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, I have to become comfortable knowing I don’t even know what I don’t know. I have to be patient and sometimes allow the rhythms of our writing workshops to slow down even more.

How am I doing? I’m not sure. There are days I’ve definitely yanked my students from beneath their kitchen tables and onto hospital beds. Days I’ve done nothing but try and fix what I saw as broken bones. But, on balance, I think those days have become less frequent. On balance, I think I’ve tried to listen better, to assist, to ask more questions.

Has this approach worked? I’m not sure I’ll ever know completely, but I guess, after I read the portfolios, I’ll know more. I’ll know, at least, enough to ask myself some additional questions.

** NOTE - here we, here we, here we go….the next big poetry event coming up is when Ann Arbor Wordworks presents its annual poetry concert Homegrown at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in the Michigan League this Friday, January 29th. A whole bunch of poets of tremendous talent - including Maggie Ambrosino, Mike Moriarty, Ben Alfaro, Courtney Whittler, Aimee Le, Fiona Chamness, Gahl Liberzon, Brittany Floyd, Daniel Bigham, Maggie Hanks, Lauren Weston, Mike Kulick, Peggy Burrows, AJ McLittle, Chris Moriarty and Anthony Zick - will be rocking the stage. The show promises to be spectacular. It’ll run from approximately 7-9pm. The Mendelssohn is @ 911 N. University Ave., in downtown Ann Arbor. Tickets will be $5 for students in advance, or $7 at the door. $10 and $12 for members of the general public. To reserve tickets at the advanced price or for more information, email me @ eyelev21@aol.com or call me @ 734-223-7443. **

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.