I’ve been teaching writing my whole adult life – there’s nothing I love more and nothing I find more important, both as a tool of identity and of structurally realigning society in ways that will move us forward. As a child, the only thing I liked more than playing sports was reading – my grandmother’s Look magazines, my aunt’s National Geographics, my sister’s Cosmopolitans, my brother’s Westerns, and any and every book my English professor parents left laying around the house. Still, when I began my Master’s in English language and literature, the only reason I taught Freshman English was that it was part of my contract: teach two sections of Freshman English each semester, and the university will waive tuition and actually give you enough to live on. I thought I wanted to teach literature. We all thought we wanted to teach literature, because teaching Shakespeare imbued cache and teaching writing was dead last on the social scale at parties. Fifth years taught Shakespeare; first years taught writing. 

The minute I walked into my first writing class, though, I loved it – loved deconstructing the writing techniques of Maya Angelou’s stories, loved demystifying the whole writing process so that it became exciting, loved treating writing like it was a game of basketball – fun, joyful, exciting, team-oriented. My beloved brother was killed just as the school year began, sparking an awareness deep inside me that something had been very wrong with the professional-class lying that passed for communication in my childhood years, and so it happened that just as I was awakening to the idea that truth-telling was the way out for me personally, I was simultaneously realizing – as I read students’ writings – that what makes student writing powerful is the strength and courage to speak the truth with an honest, authentic voice. More than once that first year, I heard one student say something to the effect of “I never thought I could write, but I’m actually having fun and learning who I am.” When I finished grad school, I went to teach writing at Howard University and I’ve never looked back.

I thought often of a brilliant colleague in my grad program who we had all admired for his sheer genius and compassion. I’d learned so much from him about teaching writing; I’d also watched him struggle with writer’s block. He literally cried trying to write every paper, wondering why he couldn’t seem to put his mind on the page when it was so easy to speak his mind in class or in the corridors. He eventually dropped out when the writer’s block became unbearable and he couldn’t stand the thought of another Incomplete.

I thought then about the role of English teachers in students’ fear of writing. I remembered my own teachers’ red marks on the pages of my assignments, from 4th grade book reports to graduate level essays: word choice, don’t begin a sentence with “and,” why is this the next part of your paper, spelling, comma, syntax – every paragraph had “problems” – and I was an A student! What about those who weren’t? What about people like my brother, struggling with the written word until he eventually dropped out of school in tenth grade? What about my friend in grad school who’d left because that external critical voice of teachers had become his internal critical voice, telling him to stop even before he’d really started?

I left Howard after a couple years, partly because one too many people told me, “Those that can’t do, teach,” and I heard a challenge. I went to work at a couple of DC think tanks, the most significant being the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank where, among other things, I wrote op-eds about human rights and international arms control. I loved writing and seeing my byline in the Washington Post etc and yes, I wasn’t dead last socially at parties, but I realized what I really loved was teaching writing – seeing the light on students’ faces when they realized they could write, listening as they read their pieces aloud, proud of finding their authentic voice.

I’ve been teaching at the University of the District of Columbia for almost two decades, centering my students’ voices, their stories, their intellectual curiosity, their deep desire to learn themselves and disrupt narratives, and their instinctive and hard-earned knowledge that education should in fact be about liberation, both personal and political. The students and I have worked hard to construct classrooms of “horizontal pedagogy,” where teacher and students commit to the job of teaching and learning simultaneously, where ideas flow horizontally across the classroom rather than vertically, rather than where the teacher has the answers and “fills up” the student. I cannot imagine a better place to learn and teach, and it’s my real honor and genuine joy to teach such talented, generous students. I go to school every day excited to step into the classroom and continue the journey I embarked on, accidentally, somewhat reluctantly, years ago.

I’ve spent my working life since those early days at the University of Maryland working on ways to strengthen student’s writing. I’ve never met a student who couldn’t write, though I’ve met thousands who believed they couldn’t. It’s my job – and my politics – to show them they can.