this event. It sounds like something I would have offered - after failing to talk her out of changing her path. I wonder if my vague memories of this are real or the creation of my present self in order to make sense of this email. I am glad that T. has found her way to teaching and finds pleasure and meaning there. I am also glad to receive a note from a former student. A colleague once coined such notes the “crumbs of affection” that teachers live on. However, I know I was just one factor among innumerable ones that allowed T. to find her way to the classroom. The seeds of our teaching come in many forms: wind-blown, dropped from the cuffs of passing pedestrians, carefully nurtured. And yet, I do want to pat myself on the back. Of all the things I could have said during that conversation, I somehow landed on the right one. I think this is due to my long affiliation with writing project sites like Hudson Valley. It was while working with writing project teachers that I learned to keep my mouth shut when students were talking. I learned how to listen to what writers were almost saying . Or, as former UCLA WP Director Faye Pietzman says, how to “listen loudly,” or, as some other writing project fellow told me, “Listen with big ears, like jazz musicians.” The Writing Project also taught me to trust students. They were authors; they could be authorities. They were capable of making choices; they deserved to have choices to make. They knew their own lives. Listen and learn from them, with them. So, when T. said she didn’t want to be a teacher, I could gently pushback, prod a bit, then give her the space to use writing to make her case. Because that is the biggest lesson, isn’t it? That writing is the best tool we have for figuring out the world and our place in it. Wait, even as I write that line, I realize it doesn’t ring true. Not “our place in it.” That is too fixed, as if there is a single place we are bound to. Writing and learning show that we are not predetermined. We have agency. We make choices, live with them, then make new choices. We learn from our experience and those of others. With new knowledge, we do new things. We revise our lives. So, let me revise this text. Writing is the best tool we have for figuring out the world and ourselves. And revising what we’ve figured out. Yes, that, for now. That is the seed the Writing Project planted and nurtured in me, and the one I have profligately spread to students, colleagues, the world. At times, I have carefully planted this seed, nurturing a garden-like classroom.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 11
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