Six Elements of a Good Teacher
It’s rare to hear a writer talk so transparently about how they became a writer. That process is often filled with a lot of awkwardness at the start.
George Saunders — the latest recipient of the Man Booker Prize— described his journey in beautiful detail in the New Yorker.
The piece is less about him and more about the two teachers—Tobias Wolff and Doug Unger—who shaped him most. We view their lives through his eyes and, in many ways, have a chance to learn from them too. Here are a few elements of great teaching I noticed in Saunders’ remembrance.
Patience
He begins in February of 1986 when he was accepted to graduate school:
“Tobias Wolff calls my parents’ house in Amarillo, Texas, leaves a message: I’ve been admitted to the Syracuse Creative Writing Program. I call back, holding Back in the WorldNotin my hands. For what seems, in chagrined memory, like eighteen hours, I tell him all of my ideas about Art and list all the things that have been holding me back artistic-development-wise and possibly (God! Yikes!) ask if he ever listens to music while he writes. He’s kind and patient and doesn’t make me feel like an idiot. I do that myself, once I hang up.”
His description will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea that they might be taken seriously in their chosen craft, those trying to find their footing in an identity that feels two sizes too big.
Relationships
As he finds that footing, Saunders emphasizes the relationships that would make him who he is today:
“One day I walk up to campus. I stand outside the door of [my teacher, Doug Unger,] . . . ogling his nameplate, thinking: ‘Man, he sometimes sits in there, the guy who wrote Leaving the Land.’ At this point in my life, I’ve never actually set eyes on a person who has published a book. It is somehow mind-blowing, this notion that the people who write books also, you know, live: go to the store and walk around campus and sit in a particular office and so on. Doug shows up and invites me in. We chat awhile, as if we are peers, as if I am a real writer too. I suddenly feel like a real writer. I’m talking to a guy who’s been in People magazine. And he’s asking me about my process. Heck, I must be a real writer.”
Throughout the piece Saunders shows how surprised he is to find how normal his teachers are. He shows over and over again that, while his respect for their craft is deep, what he takes away from them has less to do with the process of writing and more to do with living—normal, day-in-day-out, eat-some-chicken-my-wife-made living. But this revelation doesn’t hit him all at once.
Process
That’s the beauty of the piece: Saunders gets at the process, not of craft, but of becoming a well-rounded person who’s able to make something out of a well-lived life. He describes a scene at Doug Unger’s house, a workshop in which each student is to tell a story off-the-cuff from their life. Saunders describes how terrified he is to have to say something interesting to a whole group of people. But this real-life story telling practice breaks down walls for him:
“We drink more on the break than usual. And then we all do a pretty good job, actually. None of us wants to be a flop and so each of us rises to the occasion by telling a story we actually find interesting, in something like our real voice, using the same assets (humor, understatement, overstatement, funny accents, whatever) that we actually use in our everyday lives to, for example, get out of trouble, or seduce someone. For me, a light goes on: we are supposed to be — are required to be — interesting. We’re not only allowed to think about audience, we’d better. What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms. To say that ‘a light goes on’ is not quite right — it’s more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later (see below) will the light go on.”
It’s these encounters with normalcy and the empathy of his teachers that are how the “fixture gets installed” for Saunders. But the effect on Saunders’ writing is almost secondary; it’s a byproduct of his teachers’ empathy for him. Doug and Toby aren’t feigning empathy to accomplish their task as teachers. They really care about the development of their students.
Transparency
Saunders describes that in the next workshop Doug opens up about a harsh review he received. His transparency is transformational. “We liked Doug before [the bad review],” Saunders says, “Now we love him.”
Next, Saunders shares a scene from Toby’s home:
“Toby has the grad students over to watch A Night at the Opera. Mostly I watch Toby, with his family. He clearly adores them, takes visible pleasure in them, dotes on them. I have always thought great writers had to be dysfunctional and difficult, incapable of truly loving anything, too insane and unpredictable and tortured to cherish anyone, or honor them, or find them beloved.”
In fact, when Saunders has his own family in December of 1987, Doug and Toby encourage him to focus on his life instead of his work.
Priorities
Saunders’ wife Paula has a child and is bed-ridden for a month. Saunders worries and wants to spend time caring for his wife but knows that he has to invest in school as well. Here’s how Doug and Toby respond:
“I . . . promise to do the work by mail. I try to do so. I read and write like a fiend. I’m worried and distracted, schlepping back and forth from the Rapid City library and home and the post office. Finally I get a call from Doug. I’m afraid he might be calling to say that this method just isn’t working: I’m going to have to drop out, forfeit my fellowship checks. But no. He’s calling to say he thinks I’m worrying about his class too much. You’ve done enough, he says, you pass, knock it off, go spend more time with Paula, that’s what’s important, that’s what you’ll remember years from now.”
In and out of the classroom, in and out of school, his teachers care about his growth. Not his growth as a writer only, his growth as a person.
Acceptance
Saunders’ story is one that should make teachers want to be better, one that makes students hope they have teachers as good as the ones Saunders had. Really, actually, the teachers Saunders has — great teachers remain so for life, teachers of life.
Saunders ends his piece this way:
“Why do we love our writing teachers so much? Why, years later, do we think of them with such gratitude? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously. They accept us as new members of the guild. They tolerate the under-wonderful stories we write, the dopy things we say, our shaky-legged aesthetic theories, our posturing, because they have been there themselves.
“We say: I think I might be a writer.
“They say: Good for you. Proceed.”
If you liked this, you’ll like reading Saunders’ story in full here.
