It seems that all I do is talk about the weather, but, really, the weather is so distracting. This morning the sky is the color of dirty granite, glowering and ominous, and the pine trees have faded to bleak khaki. The brightest spots on the landscape are the red stains in the driveway where the snow plow leaked hydraulic fluid. The temperature hovers at freezing, and I am sitting here thinking about how much I don't want to drive my son to theater practice. Nothing nasty has happened yet, but that's only a matter of time.

My mood has not been improved by the New Yorker article I just read about Gordon Lish, famous asshole teacher and fiction editor, who appears to embody the stereotype of destructive, controlling creative writing instructor. That stereotype is not necessarily inaccurate. As you know, I did not go to graduate school, but I did take a few independent writing classes before I shifted to working privately with Baron Wormser. Even that small sample gave me a taste of the poisons of such a teacher--a concoction of sexual and stylistic manipulation that aims to pervert and contort a student's ability to expand into her own writerly self. Frequently that attitude cloaks a palpable sense of teacher jealousy: an anxiety to make sure that the student always remains inferior to himself. It's quite dreadful.

Still, I refuse to endorse the endless grousing and complaining over the so-called "workshop model." This is like claiming that all lecture-based classes are destructive or all hands-on classes are intellectually bankrupt. Good teaching is good, and bad teaching is bad, and a class with either sort of teacher can change a life.