Why Writers Should Teach High School

Rosary beads and religion. I greet my students as they enter the classroom, and they look at the words on the board with skeptical eyes. They ask me what we are doing today, but my answer is always the same: Wait. Some know they can scan the handout I’ve given them as a preview, while others are content to live in suspense. Confusion creates interest.

We read Roy Peter Clark’s essay “The Ladder of Abstraction” aloud. Some kids say they don’t get it. Others give me the look: Where are you going with this, Ripatrazone? I draw a ladder on the board, and ask them where to put religion.

“At the top,” a boy says.

A girl raises her hand behind him. “You should put religion in the middle.” She has that look like she’s about to get started, so I nod to let her know that she’s on the right track. “Maybe put faith or belief at the top.”

She’s got it. Religion is an institution; faith is an act of ambiguity. We all agree that rosary beads go at the bottom. You can hold them, turn them, feel them. But they represent something higher.

The class is full of seniors. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds about to write essays for colleges and scholarships. Some are going to enter the military; others will get a job. Some will write essays for the next four years, and others will never again write a formal narrative. My audience is skeptical, but eager. They sometimes don’t seem to be paying attention, but notice every word and reference. They are easily bored, yet also often rapt. They seek confidence mixed with humility and ambiguity. They can detect bull a mile away; they know when someone is a fake. They want to be stirred and changed—even when they won’t admit it.

In my thirteen years teaching public school English in New Jersey, I have learned that attention to audience is everything. High school teaching is a performance. Each class period is a self-contained show: There is drama, development, diversion, tension, revelation, confusion, and sometimes transcendence. Some days are wonderful. Other days are a struggle. Every day is worth it.

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I never studied education in college. I went from astronomy to philosophy to literature and creative writing. I accepted a high school teaching position while in graduate school. I planned to write, publish, and eventually land a tenure-track college job. High school teaching was supposed to be temporary.

When my first few books came out, writers would ask me the same question at my book launches and readings: “Do you actually teach high school—as in teenagers?” I would shrug, nod, and try to change the subject.

After a few years of teaching high school, I started working as an adjunct, first at Rutgers-Newark, and then at the College of New Jersey. Like so many other writers in America pining for the paltry number of tenure-track professorships, I hoped those nights, weekends, and summers in college classrooms would be my opening toward a college position. I loved my students and appreciated the opportunity to teach at the university level, but soon optimism evolved into reality. I shared cramped offices with four or more other instructors, talented teachers who bounced from campus to campus, and worked semester to semester. As a tenured high school teacher, I could afford to teach a college class here and there. Many of my peers in academia did not have such freedom.

Nearly three-quarters of American professors are contingent, non-tenure-track faculty members. Tenure-track and tenured faculty depend on adjuncts to teach lower-level courses, extra sections of courses, and fill in during sabbaticals. Adjuncts work for low pay, no health benefits, and no job security (once I had a section cancelled the night before the first class—which meant losing thousands of dollars of income). Students often do not realize that their professors—experts in their field—are treated as incidental employees.

The adjunct system is broken; we might even call it nefarious. After eight years of teaching college part-time, I’m stepping away. My twin daughters just turned four, and I want to be with my family in the evenings, not stuck in traffic on my way to teach a night class in the other half of the state. I am lucky to be able to make this decision, but it took a change in perspective. For years, I thought I had to prove myself by teaching college. For some reason, I had deluded myself—or perhaps allowed the system to delude me—into thinking that writers only existed in the academy. They don’t. I don’t.

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I see writers post on social media about going to speak to high school students. I see a push for “Writers in the School” programs. That’s fine. But I’m a writer in the school every day. I help kids become more critical and creative thinkers. I introduce them to the power of Toni Morrison, the mystery of Thomas Pynchon, and linguistic tricks and transformations of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I help them navigate the often frustrating world of standardized tests and revise their college essays. I listen when their lives seem like too much to handle. I sometimes break up fights. I advise the yearbook, and watch my editors blossom into independent writers and designers. I teach, I mentor, I question. In my classes, we joke, we laugh, but we work.

Teaching hasn’t hurt my art. In fact, I think spending most of my day with teenagers has made me a better writer. I write regularly for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, America, and The Millions, and have contributed to The Paris Review, Esquire, Runner’s World, and many other publications. I’m the author of several books from small and scholarly presses. Writing is not just something I teach; it is part of my identity. The moment I realized my writing and teaching career could work together was when I integrated my writing life into my teaching.

I’ve learned that students often struggle with reading sources because they don’t know how those sources are created. My students were writing essays about technology topics that they cared about: self-driving cars, smartphones and parenting, social media and communities. They had plenty of opinions, but had trouble finding evidence from sources to support those opinions, or to offer a contrasting perspective. They struggled to understand the elements of what I did every night and weekend: Write essays for magazines.

Or better yet, stories. Essays were staid treatises, but stories pulsed off the page. Stories are what we tell each other during the day, what we read and watch at night. Sources, essays—I had to lose that language. I had to help my students understand how magazine and newspaper writers created stories. So I took a different approach during the next class. I asked them to take out their sources.

“Writers pitch story ideas to editors,” I said. “How do you think I communicate with my editors?”

“Twitter.” The class laughs. Teenagers always stalk their teachers online.

“Never tweet at me.” I shake my head. “Okay. Email. Pitching means when you send an idea to an editor. All of the sources you have, we call those stories. Why do you think we call them stories instead of essays?”

A hand goes up in the back. “Essays are boring.”

“Maybe.” I turn off the lights, and pull up on the screen science writer Charles Choi’s pitch for “Looking This Way and That, and Learning to Adapt to the World,” an idea that he sent to The New York Times. I explained that most of the sources they were reading started just like this: a few paragraphs pitched to an editor. Those pitches started with a dramatic, detailed hook, followed by explanation and context.

Then we read Choi’s actual essay, and students got it: The pitch was almost a skeleton key for the actual story. I asked them to turn their sources into pitches, and it opened their eyes to the natural structure of essay narratives.

From then on, I began to regularly talk about the reality of being a working writer: about drafting and rejection, working with editors, and crafting work for particular audiences. I don’t give my published work for them to read—when I say that teaching is a performance, I don’t mean that the teacher is the star—it’s more of me opening up to them and helping build their confidence. Writers are not people in some mystical, far-off realm: One is right in front of them, every day.

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I now see being a working writer as something that helps me in the classroom—and the challenges and successes of working with teenagers keeps writing fresh for me. Teaching generates writing. During any given day, I interact with over a hundred teenagers in different ways. One minute I might help them try to understand how Marshall McLuhan foretold our electronic present; the next I might show them how Aimee Nezhukumatathil makes love poems new. I meticulously plan weeks in advance, but realize that I never know what can happen any given day. Teaching forces me to prepare for the world, but also embrace surprise.

When I sit down at my desk at night after my daughters have gone to bed, I am ready to write. Ideas have been percolating in my head all day, gestating through the brief yet intense personal interactions that are unique to high school teaching. I don’t waltz into my classroom and expect students to simply love William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; I recognize that they live a complex, and sadly sometimes troubled life outside of my classroom. I have to work for their attention, but isn’t that how it is supposed to be? Teaching is a job, after all. In much the same way, I have to work for my readers. Whether it is in the classroom or on the page, I never assume anything. Work begets words.

Many writers spend years looking for the light at the end of the adjunct tunnel. I took another route: teaching high school. Teenagers respond to passion and personal attention; they are looking for mentors and guides. I try to teach them skills and introduce them to great writing, but I also try to be a role model. I care about them, and believe in them.

Teaching high school offers writers a steady income, benefits, and a positive role in their community. Writers often talk about the high school teachers who changed their lives for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Writers have the power to go back into the classroom and turn their knowledge and love for literature and writing into a profession. To survive as a high school teacher, you need to be genuine. You need to have empathy. You need to know your stuff. You need to take the idea of education seriously, but you need to have a healthy sense of humor about yourself. You need to love kids; as a parent myself, I want teachers who care about my daughters beyond any particular subject matter or content. You also have to believe that education is worth fighting for—and the best place to do that is in a classroom.

As a veteran of the classroom, I’ll be a realist—not everybody is made for teaching, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that writing and teaching are exactly the same. Yet the overlap between those worlds is significant. Most writers and teachers I know are practical idealists: We want to change the world, but soon realize that is done in incremental, often painstaking ways. We plan, we draft, we strive, and we sometimes fail. We love words, and we want others to love words also. We value reading and independent thought.

Many writers struggle to find stability in their lives. They also struggle to find meaning. High school teaching can provide both. A steady job, and the chance to make profound changes in the lives of kids. Writers, consider teaching high school. You might find that your love for stories and words will be a blessing for your students—and that their youth and energy is a blessing for you.

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