Capítulo 4: Me talk pretty one day: The Learning Curve
A YEAR AFTER MY GRADUATION from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
a terrible mistake was made and I was offered a position teaching a
writing workshop. I had never gone to graduate school, and although
several of my stories had been Xeroxed and stapled, none of them had
ever been published in the traditional sense of the word.
Like branding steers or embalming the dead, teaching was a
profession I had never seriously considered. I was clearly unqualified,
yet I accepted the job without hesitation, as it would allow me to wear a
tie and go by the name of Mr. Sedaris. My father went by the same
name, and though he lived a thousand miles away, I liked to imagine
someone getting the two of us confused. "Wait a minute," this someone
might say, "are you talking about Mr. Sedaris the retired man living in
North Carolina, or Mr. Sedaris the distinguished academic?"
The position was offered at the last minute, when the scheduled
professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza. I was given two
weeks to prepare, a period I spent searching for a briefcase and standing
before my full-length mirror, repeating the words "Hello, class, my
name is Mr. Sedaris." Sometimes I‟d give myself an aggressive voice
and firm, athletic timbre. This was the masculine Mr. Sedaris, who wrote
knowingly of flesh wounds and tractor pulls. Then there was the ragged
bark of the newspaper editor, a tone that coupled wisdom with an
unlimited capacity for cruelty. I tried sounding businesslike and worldweary, but when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the
true Mr. Sedaris revealed himself. In a voice reflecting doubt, fear, and
an unmistakable desire to be loved, I sounded not like a thoughtful
college professor but, rather, like a high-strung twelve-year-old girl;
someone named Brittany.
My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view
me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags
fashioned in the shape of maple leaves. I‟d cut them myself out of
orange construction paper and handed them out along with a box of
straight pins. My fourth-grade teacher had done the same thing,
explaining that we were to take only one pin per person. This being
college rather than elementary school, I encouraged my students to take
as many pins as they liked. They wrote their names upon their leaves,
fastened them to their breast pockets, and bellied up to the long oak table
that served as our communal desk.
"All right then," I said. "Okay, here we go." I opened my briefcase
and realized that I‟d never thought beyond this moment. The orange
leaves were the extent of my lesson plan, but still I searched the empty
briefcase, mindful that I had stupidly armed my audience with straight
pins. I guess I‟d been thinking that, without provocation, my students
would talk, offering their thoughts and opinions on the issues of the day.
I‟d imagined myself sitting on the edge of the desk, overlooking a forest
of raised hands. The students would simultaneously shout to be heard,
and I‟d pound on something in order to silence them. "Whoa people,"
I‟d yell. "Calm down, you‟ll all get your turn. One at a time, one at a
time."
The error of my thinking yawned before me. A terrible silence
overtook the room, and seeing no other option, I instructed my students
to pull out their notebooks and write a brief essay related to the theme of
profound disappointment.
I‟d always hated it when a teacher forced us to invent something on
the spot. Aside from the obvious pressure, it seemed that everyone had
his or her own little way of doing things, especially when it came to
writing. Maybe someone needed a particular kind of lamp or pen or
typewriter. In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred
tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.
I made a note to bring in some ashtrays and then I rooted through the
wastepaper basket for a few empty cans. Standing beneath the
prominently displayed NO SMOKING sign, I distributed the cans and cast my
cigarettes upon the table, encouraging my students to go at it. This, to
me, was the very essence of teaching, and I thought I‟d made a real
breakthrough until the class asthmatic raised his hand, saying that, to the
best of his knowledge, Aristophanes had never smoked a cigarette in his
life. "Neither did Jane Austen," he said. "Or the Brontës."
I jotted these names into my notebook alongside the word
Troublemaker, and said I‟d look into it. Because I was the writing
teacher, it was automatically assumed that I had read every leatherbound volume in the Library of Classics. The truth was that I had read
none of those books, nor did I intend to. I bluffed my way through most
challenges with dim memories of the movie or miniseries based upon the
book in question, but it was an exhausting exercise and eventually I
learned it was easier to simply reply with a question, saying, "I know
what Flaubert means to me, but what do you think of her?"
As Mr. Sedaris I lived in constant fear. There was the perfectly
understandable fear of being exposed as a fraud, and then there was the
deeper fear that my students might hate me. I imagined them calling
their friends on the phone. "Guess who I got stuck with," they‟d say.
Most dull teachers at least had a few credentials to back them up. They
had a philosophy and a lesson plan and didn‟t need to hide behind a clipon tie and an empty briefcase.
Whenever I felt in danger of losing my authority, I would cross the
room and either open or close the door. A student needed to ask
permission before regulating the temperature or noise level, but I could
do so whenever I liked. It was the only activity sure to remind me that I
was in charge, and I took full advantage of it.
"There he goes again," my students would whisper. "What‟s up with
him and that door?"
The asthmatic transferred to another class, leaving me with only eight
students. Of these, four were seasoned smokers who took long,
contemplative drags and occasionally demonstrated their proficiency by
blowing ghostly concentric rings that hovered like halos above their
bowed heads. The others tried as best they could, but it wasn‟t pretty. By
the end of the second session, my students had produced nothing but
ashes. Their hacking coughs and complete lack of output suggested that,
for certain writers, smoking was obviously not enough.
Thinking that a clever assignment might help loosen them up, I
instructed my students to write a letter to their mothers in prison. They
were free to determine both the crime and the sentence, and references to
cellmates were strongly encouraged.
The group set to work with genuine purpose and enthusiasm, and I felt
proud of myself, until the quietest member of the class handed in her
paper, whispering that both her father and her uncle were currently
serving time on federal racketeering charges.
"I just never thought of my mom going off as well," she said. "This
was just a really… depressing assignment."
I‟d never known what an actual child-to-parent prison letter might be
like, but now I had a pretty clear idea. I envisioned two convicts sharing
a cell. One man stood at the sink while the other lay on a bunk, reading
his mail.
"Anything interesting?" the standing man asked.
"Oh, it‟s from my daughter," the other man said. "She‟s just started
college, and apparently her writing teacher is a real asshole."
That was the last time I asked my students to write in class. From that
point on all their stories were to be written at home on the subject of
their choice. If I‟d had my way, we would have all stayed home and
conducted the class through smoke signals. As it was, I had to find some
way to pass the time and trick my students into believing that they were
getting an education. The class met twice a week for two hours a day.
Filling an entire session with one activity was out of the question, so I
began breaking each session into a series of brief, regularly scheduled
discussion periods. We began each day with Celebrity Corner. This was
an opportunity for the students to share interesting bits of information
provided by friends in New York or Los Angeles who were forever
claiming firsthand knowledge of a rock band‟s impending breakup or
movie star‟s dark sexual secret. Luckily everyone seemed to have such a
friend, and we were never short of material.
Celebrity Corner was followed by the Feedbag Forum, my shameless
call for easy, one-pot dinner recipes, the type favored by elderly aunts
and grandmothers whose dental status demanded that all meat fall from
the bone without provocation. When asked what Boiled Beef Arkansas
had to do with the craft of writing, I did not mention my recent purchase
of a Crock-Pot; rather, I lied through my rotten teeth, explaining that it
wasn‟t the recipe itself but the pacing that was of interest to the writer.
After the Feedbag Forum it was time for Pillow Talk, which was
defined as "an opportunity for you to discuss your private sex lives in a
safe, intellectual environment." The majority of my students were
reluctant to share their experiences, so arrangements were made with the
audiovisual department. I then took to wheeling in a big color television
so that we might spend an hour watching One Life to Live. This was
back when Victoria Buchanan passed out at her twentieth high-school
reunion and came to remembering that rather than graduating with the
rest of her class, she had instead hitchhiked to New York City, where
she‟d coupled with a hippie and given birth to a long-lost daughter. It
sounds farfetched, but like a roast forsaken in the oven or a rescheduled
dental appointment, childbirth is one of those minor details that tends to
slip the minds of most soap opera characters. It‟s a personality trait
you‟ve just got to accept.
On General Hospital or Guiding Light a similar story might come off
as trite or even laughable. This, though, was One Life to Live, and no
one could suddenly recall the birth of a child quite like Erika Slezak,
who played both Victoria Buchanan and her alternate personality, Nicole
Smith. I‟d been in the habit of taping the show and watching it every
night while eating dinner. Now that I was an academic, I could watch it
in class and use the dinner hour to catch up on All My Children. A few
students grumbled, but again I assured them that this was all part of my
master plan.
Word came from the front office that there had been some complaints
regarding my use of class time. This meant I‟d have to justify my daily
screenings with a homework assignment. Now the students were to
watch an episode and write what I referred to as a "guessay," a brief
prediction of what might take place the following day.
"Remember that this is not Port Charles or Pine Valley," I said. "This
is Llanview, Pennsylvania, and we‟re talking about the Buchanan
family."
It actually wasn‟t a bad little assignment. While the dialogue
occasionally falters, you have to admire daytime dramas for their
remarkable attention to plot. Yes, there were always the predictable
kidnappings and summer love triangles, but a good show could always
surprise you with something as simple as the discovery of an
underground city. I‟d coached my students through half a dozen
episodes, giving them background information and explaining that
missing children do not just march through the door ten minutes after the
critical delivery flashback. The inevitable reunion must unfold delicately
and involve at least two-thirds of the cast.
I thought I‟d effectively conveyed the seriousness of the assignment. I
thought that in my own way I had actually taught them something, so I
was angry when their papers included such predictions as "the long-lost
daughter turns out to be a vampire" and "the next day Vicki chokes to
death while eating a submarine sandwich." The vampire business
smacked of Dark Shadows reruns, and I refused to take it seriously. But
choking to death on a sandwich, that was an insult. Victoria was a
Buchanan and would never duck into a sub shop, much less choke to
death in a single episode. Especially on a Wednesday. Nobody dies on a
Wednesday — hadn‟t these people learned anything?
In the past I had tried my hardest to be understanding, going so far as
to allow the conjugation of nouns and the use of such questionable
words as whateverishly. This though, was going too far. I‟d taught the
Buchanans‟ Llanview just as my colleagues had taught Joyce‟s Dublin
or Faulkner‟s Mississippi, but that was over now. Obviously certain
people didn‟t deserve to watch TV in the middle of the afternoon. If my
students wanted to stare at the walls for two hours a day, then fine, from
here on out we‟d just stick to the basics.
I don‟t know who invented the template for the standard writing
workshop, but whoever it was seems to have struck the perfect balance
between sadism and masochism. Here is a system designed to eliminate
pleasure for everyone involved. The idea is that a student turns in a
story, which is then read and thoughtfully critiqued by everyone in the
class. In my experience the process worked, in that the stories were
occasionally submitted, Xeroxed, and distributed hand to hand. They
were folded into purses and knapsacks, but here the system tended to
break down. Come critique time, most students behaved as if the
assignment had been to confine the stories in a dark, enclosed area and
test their reaction to sensory deprivation. Even if the papers were read
out loud in class, the discussions were usually brief, as the combination
of good manners and complete lack of interest kept most workshop
participants from expressing their honest opinions.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the stories were thinly veiled
accounts of the author‟s life as he or she attempted to complete the
assignment. Roommates were forever stepping out of showers, and
waitresses appeared out of nowhere to deliver the onion rings and
breakfast burritos that stained the pages of the manuscripts. The
sloppiness occasionally bothered me, but I had no room to complain.
This was an art school, and the writing workshop was commonly known
as the easiest way to fulfill one‟s mandatory English credits. My
students had been admitted because they could admirably paint or sculpt
or videotape their bodies in exhausting detail, and wasn‟t that enough?
They told funny, compelling stories about their lives, but committing the
details to paper was, for them, a chore rather than an aspiration. The way
I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least
I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers. Even
if someone had used his real name and recounted, say, a recent
appointment with an oral surgeon, I would accept the story as pure
fiction, saying, "So tell us, Dean, how did you come up with this
person?"
The student might mumble, pointing to the bloodied cotton wad
packed against his swollen gum, and I‟d ask, "When did you decide that
your character should seek treatment for his impacted molar?" This line
of questioning allowed the authors to feel creative and protected anyone
who held an unpopular political opinion.
"Let me get this straight," one student said. "You‟re telling me that if I
say something out loud, it‟s me saying it, but if I write the exact same
thing on paper, it‟s somebody else, right?"
"Yes," I said. "And we‟re calling that fiction."
The student pulled out his notebook, wrote something down, and
handed me a sheet of paper that read, "That‟s the stupidest fucking thing
I ever heard in my life."
They were a smart group.
As Mr. Sedaris I made it a point to type up a poorly spelled evaluation
of each submitted story. I‟d usually begin with the high points and end, a
page or two later, by dispensing such sage professional advice as
"Punctuation never hurt anyone" or "Think verbs!" I tended to lose
patience with some of the longer dream sequences, but for the most part
we all got along, and the students either accepted or politely ignored my
advice.
Trouble arose only when authors used their stories to vindicate
themselves against a great hurt or perceived injustice. This was the case
with a woman whom the admissions office would have labeled a
"returning student," meaning that her social life did not revolve around
the cafeteria. The woman was a good fifteen years older than me and
clearly disapproved of my teaching methods. She never contributed to
Pillow Talk or the Feedbag Forum, and I had good reason to suspect it
was she who had complained about the One Life to Live episodes. With
the teenage freshmen, I stood a chance, but there was nothing I could do
to please someone who regularly complained that she‟d wasted enough
time already. The class was divided into two distinct groups, with her on
one side and everyone else on the other. I‟d tried everything except leg
irons, but nothing could bring the two sides together. It was a real
problem.
The returning student had recently come through a difficult divorce,
and because her pain was significant, she wrongly insisted that her
writing was significant as well. Titled something along the lines of "I
Deserve Another Chance," her story was not well received by the class.
Following the brief group discussion, I handed her my written
evaluation, which she quietly skimmed over before raising her hand.
"Yes," she said. "If you don‟t mind, I have a little question." She lit a
cigarette and spent a moment identifying with the smoldering match.
"Who are you," she asked. "I mean, just who in the hell are you to tell
me that my story has no ending?"
It was a worthwhile question that was bound to be raised sooner or
later. I‟d noticed that her story had ended in mid-sentence, but that aside,
who was I to offer criticism to anyone, especially in regard to writing?
I‟d meant to give the issue some serious thought, but there had been
shirts to iron and name tags to make and, between one thing and another,
I managed to put it out of my mind.
The woman repeated the question, her voice breaking. "Just who… in
the stinking hell do you think … you are?"
"Can I give you an answer tomorrow?" I asked.
"No," she barked. "I want to know now. Who do you think you are?"
Judging from their expressions, I could see that the other side of the
class was entertaining the same question. Doubt was spreading through
the room like the cold germs seen in one of those slow-motion close-ups
of a sneeze. I envisioned myself burning on a pyre of dream sequences,
and then the answer came to me.
"Who am I?" I asked. "I am the only one who is paid to be in this
room." This was nothing I‟d necessarily want to embroider on a pillow,
but still, once the answer left my mouth, I embraced it as a perfectly
acceptable teaching philosophy. My previous doubts and fears
evaporated, as now I knew that I could excuse anything. The new Mr.
Sedaris would never again back down or apologize. From here on out,
I‟d order my students to open and close the door and let that remind me
that I was in charge. We could do whatever I wanted because I was a
certified professional — it practically said so right there on my
paycheck. My voice deepened as I stood to straighten my tie. "All right
then," I said. "Does anyone else have a stupid question for Mr. Sedaris?"
The returning student once again raised her hand. "It‟s a personal
question, I know, but exactly how much is the school paying you to be
in this room?"
I answered honestly, and then, for the first time since the beginning of
the school year, my students came together as one. I can‟t recall which
side started it, I remember only that the laughter was so loud, so violent
and prolonged that Mr. Sedaris had to run and close the door so that the
real teachers could conduct their business in peace.
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