The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Plodders, dilettantes, novices
Dead poets and wonder boys

A friend of mine who teaches anthropology loves the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies. Who cares if they’re unrealistic, he says; how can you not like seeing yourself as Indiana Jones? Writing teachers also appear surprisingly often in the movies, frequently in heroic roles. The charismatic John Keating of Dead Poets Society, the gutsy Erin Gruwell of Freedom Writers, the caring William Forrester of Finding Forrester, the winsome Grady Tripp of Wonder Boys. Such movies show us teachers who change the lives of students through writing. So you might think that most real-life writing teachers would applaud these flattering versions of who we are and what we do. But, in fact, many of us feel impatient with such films. The idealized versions of teaching they offer seem at once unattainable and off-target. In the midst of all their jumping on desks and running after troubled students, we rarely see movie teachers get down to the actual labor of commenting on student drafts or preparing for the next day’s classes. The hard and ordinary work of teaching writing—the work we know and value—gets lost in the larger-than-life heroics of movie teachers.

But do we really want to begrudge such a positive view of teaching? After all, do the movies offer a realistic view of any profession? And if most of us can’t hope to be as funny and passionate as John Keating or as devoted to students as Erin Gruwell, doesn’t it seem a little self-serving to argue that good teaching doesn’t really hinge on such qualities? It’s easy enough to criticize the heroic view of the teacher such movies present. The question is what to offer in its place.

In this opening chapter, I look at the problems raised by the writing teacher as movie hero to clear some space for another way of thinking about how our work has been depicted by non-academics. In my view we can learn more from movie versions of our work if we spend less time asking about how they portray us as professionals and more about how they depict the intellectual labor of teaching. From teacher to teaching. We need to look for those moments in films when teachers and students work together on writing and see what we can learn from what goes on in them.

But first I want to look at the two main ways the movies have presented writing teachers. On the one hand, there is the teacher as hero—exemplified by John Keating in Dead Poets Society and Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers—who works energetically to inspire students to find their own voices as writers. On the other hand, there is the teacher as a burned-out case—Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys, Frank in Educating Rita, William in Finding Forrester—who is himself in need of rescue, blocked as both a writer and a feeling person. And there is strikingly little else in between. The dead poets and wonder boys of film thus end up testifying to the limits of imagining the success of teaching as hinging on the person, the charisma of the teacher.

Plodders, dilettantes, novices

But before I turn to those dead poets and wonder boys, let me point quickly to a few other glimpses of writing teachers in the movies. None of these scenes appear in movies about teaching; rather, the point of each is provide some backstory, to offer insight into the makeup of a leading character by revealing that he or she teaches writing. All of them strike me as deft, comic, and realistic—even if none presents our field as we might hope.

The first comes from Saving Private Ryan, Stephen Spielberg’s 1998 film recounting a mission behind enemy lines to rescue an American soldier during the D-Day invasion. The leader of this mission, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), is a figure of awe and fascination to the soldiers in his platoon, who have a running bet to see who can guess what Miller’s job back home is. Of course, none of them can, and the secret is not revealed until a tense moment midway through the film when Miller’s field sergeant (Tom Sizemore) finds himself in a fierce argument with one of his own soldiers. A pistol is pointed and threats are shouted until the captain breaks in to ask, “What’s the pool on me up to?” Having thus seized the startled attention of his company, he quietly tells them, “I’m a schoolteacher. I teach English composition.”

Clearly, no one has guessed this occupation. The sergeant, pistol still in hand, turns toward the camera and mutters, “I’ll be doggone.” The situation is defused. The war hero has revealed himself as a regular guy, with as mundane a stateside job as can be imagined. As Captain Miller himself goes on to say:

Back home, I tell people what I do for a living, and they go, that figures. But here . . . here everything is a big mystery. So I guess I’ve changed. (Saving Private Ryan 1:39)¹

It’s a familiar war-movie scene: adversity calls forth greatness from an ordinary man. Of course, what makes the scene stand out for me, though, is the wry jolt of self-recognition it prompts. In searching for a job that would instantly peg its holder as undistinguished, earnest, and banal—the filmmakers came up with my own.

But if teaching English composition signifies a prior life of quiet dullness for John Miller, it is intended to point out something else altogether about Annie Savoy, the siren of minor-league baseball played by Susan Sarandon in Ron Shelton’s 1988 Bull Durham. Annie is an artsy, flighty, talkative flirt who each summer, as a kind of erotic hobby, seduces a new ballplayer on the Durham Bulls, the minor-league baseball team in her southern hometown. In the summer in which the film is set, though, she finds herself torn between a promising young pitcher and a veteran catcher, Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner. Midway through the film, Annie and Crash fall into the sort of exasperated bickering that in romantic comedies is almost always the prelude to sex and love. Crash is clearly attracted to Annie but mocks her colorful clothing, assertive sexuality, and impromptu philosophizing as “a little excessive for the Carolina league.” When Annie quotes William Blake in response (“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”), Crash throws up his arms and says, “Who are you? I mean, do you even have a job?” To which Annie defiantly replies, “I teach part-time at Alamance Junior College, English 101 and beginning composition” (Bull Durham 1:10).

So again the answer to the question—what sort of job could this person possibly hold?—turns out to be teaching writing. But Annie Savoy is not a plodder like John Miller; she is, rather, an enthusiast and a bit of a scatterbrain—not someone who would be taken seriously as an intellectual or a “real” professor but still someone we can easily imagine teaching “beginning composition.” As the director of a university writing program, I once asked an applicant for a part-time position teaching first-year writing why they were interested in the job, only to have them tell me that “it seems like something a reasonably well-educated person can do without much training.” Annie Savoy is that sort of educated but untrained person. I’m aware that this scene from Bull Durham might perturb many women, southerners, two-year college faculty, and writing teachers. But that is pretty much the point. Teaching composition often operates as a punch line in our culture. Given that, I am intrigued that so much criticism in our field has been directed toward images that idealize our work.

But let me offer one more glimpse of the writing teacher—one I find accurate and endearing. In Alan J. Pakula’s 1979 Starting Over, Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, an airline magazine writer who decides, as he begins a new life after a messy divorce, to get a job teaching college writing. And so we watch as Phil, dressed in a natty tweed jacket and slacks, cautiously approaches his first 9:00 a.m. class. After stalling for a moment at the water fountain, Phil enters the classroom and nervously introduces himself to about thirty chatty and distracted students. The clock on the wall behind him reads 9:02. A jump cut then shows Phil sitting behind a desk, in mid-sentence, telling the class “and so, the next time we meet, I’d like you to bring a magazine article that you like, and we’ll discuss it.” He then gathers his books and papers together and moves to leave. At that point, one of the students interjects, “Uh, Mr. Potter, the class doesn’t end until ten.” We look again at the clock. It is 9:04. Phil returns to his seat and says “good, that gives me a chance to answer all your questions for . . . the next fifty-six minutes” before sheepishly admitting that he will make sure to prepare more material for the next class (Starting Over, 0:43).

With a quick and empathetic wit, this scene surfaces one of the deepest anxieties of any teacher: that you will simply run out of things to say. It also hints that there might more to teaching writing than just knowing how to write. Starting Over never returns to the classroom, so we don’t learn if or how Phil grows any better as a teacher. And certainly, in this brief comic scene, he seems a disastrous (if likable) combination of the plodding John Miller and the scattered Annie Savoy. But we do get a sense, if only by inference, that there is craft to teaching that Phil has yet to learn. I’ve seen few other movies that suggest as much.

Plodders, dilettantes, novices. These are familiar and uncontroversial images of writing teachers. But then things start to get bad. The movies start to show us as heroes.