Joining Mystics in Mystic, Learning with an MFA Cohort

I had the pleasure of returning to Mystic, Connecticut today to join Fairfield University's MFA cohort during their winter retreat on Enders Island. There, over 50 individuals working on collections of poetry, short stories, creative essays, novels, and memoirs met to workshop with published authors, literary agents, editors, and directors of exceptional writing programs. The Island juts into the Long Island Sound just before Rhode Island and is a perfect location, albeit cold and icy today, to workshop creativity within a writing community. The aura was welcoming.

During the reading of one man's novel (a chapter actually), a discussion ensued about E.B. White's farming background and his portrayal of a dachshund and a pig. The writer who was reading discussed his own childhood on a farm and the first time a pig he named and raised was slaughtered and hung on a hook. It was shortly after the pig took a state Fair prize. The author told the group that the lesson he learned from seeing his pig on a hook was never to give an animal a name. As soon as they are named, they become family which makes nature's inevitability (the slaughter) that much harsher.

Harsh. Indeed.

I couldn't help but connect pig discussion to the current field of teaching. In the test-crazed bonanza of scores, scores, scores in K-12 schools, it seems that de-naming students into percentages is exactly what our governments want us to do. If teachers are expected to see children merely as numbers to be awarded or punished for the ability to take an exam, then teachers are required to lose the human side of teaching. Kids are no longer aren't recognized as capable human beings with tremendous potential but as test takers who may or may not represent achievement by how a state declares knowledge should be measured. In other words, testing is dehumanizing. They are a means for politicians and state systems to justify their own careers.

This also made me recall Dr. Leslie Heywood's teaching at Binghamton where I was an undergraduate. In an exercise on how the body (mostly female body) is viewed in Western literature, she made us analyze Silence of the Lambs. She discussed that when authorities asked a female victim's mom to name her on national television it stalled the killer's intent simply because the body was no longer a carcass for the maiming of a madman but a human being with a name, a family, and a life. Before that, she was just a number in his killing spree to make a female-fleshed suit.

The reporting of students as mere numbers in our system's accountability is another way we unname the individuality and character of each and every student we teach. Instead of seeing them as the well-rounded, agentive and creative people they are, we are put them in categories simply to "write" them off and, alas, punish teachers for not helping such "numbers" to succeed. Teachers are no longer expected to develop character within kids, but are pushed to emphasize examinations and, in Tolkien terms, the glaring eye of Mortor.

As I listened to professionals workshop their thinking in a mature, supportive, and constructive fashion I grew sad. This style of progressive education was what I knew in Kentucky and what I sometimes witnessed as a researcher. Such work was  tremendously successful and helped to develop a community of writers and active youth. Unfortunately, it is rare to see such positive instructional practices in K-12 environments today because the mad craze of assessment has place an ugly hold on what schools have become. I argue that we should bring more practices like that of an MFA program into America's schools so we support teachers to coach and mentor them as writers. Read like writers. Live like writers. Invest in youth. You would think it would this easy.