A good couple of days

I love to teach. I can't explain it; I just do. Sometimes you never, ever find out whether you did a damned bit of good. Sometimes you find out years, even decades, later that something you don't even remember saying changed someone's life. And sometimes you can see miracles right before your eyes.

I'm doing three lots of teaching at the moment: tutoring in writing academic English, with non-native-speaker doctoral candidates; a workshop for adult beginning writers of science fiction and fantasy; and after-school tutoring for kids in refugee families who are in the process of resettling here in Wollongong. So, obviously, I don't expect one day to be just like the last (not that it ever has been, in my case). Even so, I was surprised twice this week by fabulous, widely different, and yet eerily similar Cool Teaching Moments.

In the first, one of my adult beginners got inspired during some down time at work by a handout I'd given the class about how to format a manuscript. He emailed me a story he'd just tossed off, and it was hilarious and brilliant and just plain fun and just plain good. I don't claim any credit for it: I hadn't set it as an assignment, I hadn't given any specific guidelines for that type of story — he could very easily have written it during that downtime even had we never met. But what I can (and will) claim credit for is being able to let him know that I thought both he and his writing are important, which perhaps gave him the space to try new (and bloody brilliant) things in his writing, and to show them to me. That's a lot for any writer, inexperienced or multi-Hugo-winning, in my opinion.

Today was the second. A high-school girl had been assigned the writing of a myth-type story to "explain" the particular geological formation she was researching (in her case, the Twelve Apostles). She speaks four languages fluently, but none of them is English. Her English is pretty good, don't get me wrong, but she's not particularly comfortable in it. The thought of writing a full-page story was daunting her to the point of immobility. I didn't really know what to do: I could easily have written it for her, of course, but just as of course, I didn't want to. In desperation, I started off with the idea I start pretty much all my writing courses with: "What problem does this character have? How is he going to solve it?" For each plot point she had originally jotted down, I pressed: "Why are they doing this? How does it help them solve their problem?"

"I don't know, Miss*."

"What are some of the reasons they could be going down the hill?"

"I don't know, Miss."

I gave her a couple of examples. "Maybe they could be looking for food. Or running away from something that's trying to eat them. Or running away from a wizard. You can pick one of those."

Soon, I would add, "What else could they be doing? Uh-huh, that would work. What else? What else?"

Suddenly, instead of "I don't know, Miss," or something that was a tiny variation on the thing I'd just said, out of nowhere I got a really major and truly excellent plot twist: "Or they could have taken the wizard's magic stick."

You know how sometimes it feels like someone's scooped you up and flung you up into the clouds for a brief, shining moment? That's what that felt like.

Teaching is cool.


*For my American readers: Aussie schoolkids address their teachers as "Sir" and "Miss" (regardless of marital status). This is a custom I find entirely attractive, and I yearn (alas, most likely in vain) for its adoption in American schools.