Some unsorted thoughts on teaching:

Whenever I remember terrible teachers I get vaguely sick to my stomach and faintly angry and wish I hadn’t started remembering in the first place. This even though they knew their material. There are people who remember my teaching in my most specialized courses with vague nausea and faint anger (fools!) and so I sympathize with them. Oddly enough, some of the best-reviewed teaching I’ve done has been in classes for which I was unprepared by previous schooling. This leaves me thinking that sometimes it is best for the teacher not to know much, and to know that.

The best teachers combine elastic minds with generous hearts and relentless self discipline.

One good way to teach them is to convince them that you are off your rocker.

Teaching of any kind discloses the workings of our minds, including how we avoid disclosure or risk. In this, teaching is parallel to writing.

I want students to put aside their histories to the point that they can confront ideas. One way to be able to put aside our history is to confront it.

There is nothing more clearly antithetical to the teacher’s role as concerned offerer of paths toward learning than the cut-off end point judging of the student’s past signified in a grade.

Teaching English well requires even more judgment than writing well. The risk taking of the writer in draft can be withheld; the risk taking of the teacher causes drafts, even storms, that can’t be retrieved.

We are in our bodies and minds mediums for teaching, but not in the mindless conduit fashion of a piece of metal wire conducting this knowledge bit from here to there, but rather more like the spiritualist who opens to the radiance of eternity and allows entrance for the seeker.

People write about what they know and English majors read those things and then English majors get interested in things people write about and then English majors become English teachers and talk about all those things they’ve been reading and then…oh well