The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Plagiarism
Forging a self

Like Dead Poets Society, May Sarton’s 1961 novel, The Small Room, is preoccupied with what it means to be a good teacher. Also like Dead Poets, The Small Room is set in a single-sex school in New England, although in this case it is a women’s college rather than a boys’ prep school. At that point the similarities fade. The atmosphere of Appleton College in The Small Room is scholarly, intense, cloistered; there are no teachers jumping up on desks. On the contrary, in a powerful chapter, we see a class begin not with a “dramatic opening” but its “exact opposite” (112), as a senior professor turns from the window to ask her students:

You have all read some of the Keats letters. Would one of you like to read a passage aloud, or a whole letter that you think appropriate for class discussion? (112)

The rest of the chapter shows the professor artfully leading her students through the letters, working with the passages they have chosen, highlighting and connecting themes as they arise, before finally closing the class by reading a few excerpts from Keats that she has herself selected. Her students move with her not toward a self-understanding, an epiphany of the Dead Poets sort, but toward a deeper understanding of a subject outside of themselves. It is an extraordinary class, one of the few I have read in fiction that I would want to take as a guide for my own work as a teacher.

Lucy Winter, the protagonist of the novel, is a quiet and observant young woman who has just broken off an engagement and, unsure of what she wants to do next, has come to teach for a year at Appleton. A few weeks into her first semester, Lucy stumbles upon a case of plagiarism. The protégé of the most respected professor on campus has copied much of her piece for Appleton Essays from an obscure article by Simone Weil that Lucy happens to have read. There is an initial attempt to cover up the incident after Lucy reluctantly reports it, but word soon gets out in the small college community, and both the professor and the student are shamed.

It’s clear that the student plagiarizes out of a desire not to deceive but to impress her mentor. What is valued at Appleton is not self-expression but a passionate commitment to scholarship. Still, professors and students alike wonder about the personal costs of such devotion. As the student confides to Lucy about her work with her mentor:

From the time I first had her as a Sophomore she has been at me to produce, produce, produce . . . The more you do, the more you’re expected to do, and each thing has got to be better, always better. (100)

Such pressures don’t excuse plagiarism, and the student in this case is clearly troubled and confused. In trying to prove that she really is the sort of scholar her mentor expects, she traduces what both of them hold dear. If she had cared less, she would not have plagiarized. This is the irony Sarton explores with such skill and nuance. We long for the affection and praise of our teachers or our students, but we can only gain it from them indirectly, through the work we do with a subject. For the moment we ask directly for their friendship or their love, we are no longer teacher and student.

Lucy comments on this paradox later on in the novel. The students in her introductory literature class invite her to tea near the end of the semester and, as is so often the case, the event falls flat. Even though Lucy’s students like and respect her, they have no idea how to make small talk with her. How could they? As she is getting ready to leave, Lucy tells them:

What you want, I would guess, is to make contact with the human being, with me myself, not Professor Winter. And this is possible sometimes between a student and a professor, but . . . Maybe it can only be done after that particular relationship has ended. In the classroom, you see, there are three entities present, you the class, me, and a third far greater than we who fuses us at moments into a whole. When that third is absent, our real relationship falls apart. (216—17)

Lucy is surely correct that the job of a teacher is to connect with students in relation to a subject—much as, earlier in the novel, we saw happen in her colleague’s class on Keats’s letters. There is a bond but also a needed impersonality or reserve. The plagiarism case that drives the plot of The Small Room shows, though, how difficult it can be to sustain such a relationship—particularly as a student grows to admire and identify with her teacher and her teacher begins to see herself in her protégé. The connection they feel for each other starts to displace their focus on the subject that first brought them together.

I suspect it may be especially hard to maintain such an emotional reserve when the subject of instruction is writing. Our work as writers is bound up tightly with who we are or want to be. The third entity Lucy speaks of, the subject that lies outside both teacher and students, is not present, I think, in quite the same way in a writing class as it is in a course on literature or anthropology or history. The work on the table is likely to feel more closely tied to both teacher and students—particularly when what they are discussing is a writer’s style, the eloquence or persuasiveness of their approach. The situation is complicated even more by the understandable tendency of aspiring writers to want to sound like the established writers they most admire. You want to forge your own voice as a writer; you just also hope that voice sounds something like Ernest Hemingway or Alice Walker or your professor.