Teachers and Ridicule

There's yet another Internet brouhaha about MFA degrees. A former fiction teacher at a low-residency program has published an article in which he disses a number of his students as untalented, lazy, posturing, etc., etc. The article is flippant, certainly, and I'm sure it was extraordinarily hurtful to his former students. But for me, it brought up a few questions--notably, since when is a teacher responsible only for teaching students who have the potential to be great?

Let's set aside all the many complaints (conspiracy-theory and otherwise) associated with MFA programs in writing--e.g., universities making money from students who will never get jobs, canned approaches to creative exploration, a focus on contemporary poetry at the expense of a deep knowledge of the past, a clubby exclusivity that damages the hopes of serious writers who don't have graduate degrees. Beyond these issues is the responsibility of teacher to student. Is the teacher tasked with transforming this person into James Joyce? Or is the teacher tasked with seeing the student as an individual striver, with her own knowledge and curiosity and ignorance, and helping her move more deeply into an apprenticeship with the art?

Any public school teacher can share stories about a student who, say, after an entire year of fifth grade, has finally learned to write his name, even though everyone else in the class has moved onto long division. This student's success, in that moment, reflects the enduring joy of the profession.

Perhaps one expects graduate-level work to be more dazzling. But many programs accept students who do not have strong backgrounds in creative writing, or even any background at all. Should schools call this training "master's level work"? This is a reasonable question. Meanwhile, however, the teacher must work with the students who appear in her classroom, and she owes them care and respect.

Students, especially those who are paying for a graduate degree, also have responsibility to the teacher and to the art. They need to be willing to read, for instance; and if they aren't, they shouldn't be allowed to graduate. But teachers are always going to have some students who try to get by without doing the work, others who find themselves drowning in it. At the same time teachers will have students who make vital discoveries about themselves, the world, and the work of writing--even though they may never become technically skilled enough to publish a single poem. And as human beings, these students matter a lot.

Regular readers of this blog know that I don't have an advanced degree. While I have occasionally worked as a visiting writer in graduate programs, I have done all of my own creative work outside the academy. Thus, I'm in no way spouting canned support for the status quo of the MFA. My interest is in the relationship between teacher and student. And at every level--kindergarten through postdoctoral study--the ideal should be respect as well as rigorous attention to the individual's particular needs and abilities. Ridicule has no part in that ideal.