Prepare Less, Teach More

The thing I love most about teaching is the performative improvisational aspect that dominates during my best teaching days. Since I began teaching, first creative writing, then composition, and finally literature, I’ve always been most comfortable when I arrive to class slightly unprepared, with no set agenda. My classroom is by no means a “de-centered” zone—I like to maintain control—but I do do my best work when I don’t know what I’m going to say next and then constantly surprise myself when I say it.

In recent years, though, I’ve become what I thought was more “responsible.” I prepare lectures daily, set specific goals, and try to enlighten young minds with what ultimately, more often than not, seems like rote recitation of ideas and facts. I don’t want to give the lectures up completely, but it occurs to me recently that I should write the lectures, then leave them at home. The writing helps me to think through the material, but the actual physical remnants of that thought, the pages of notes I usually bring to class are ultimately a hindrance to my own teaching style.

The best two days this term have been days when I’ve been too busy (or too lazy—I sleep in a lot) to prepare detailed lectures. One was today. I am teaching Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and because I’ve only read the book twice myself, and have never taught it, feel like I have very little intellectual ownership of the text. I spoke to my friend John (an older, much more experienced teacher) before class and he expressed amazement that I would try to teach that particular book to a classroom full of non-English Major freshmen. But try I did, and for the most part it was a success.

I am astonished at my own ability to discuss, interpret, and peform texts on the fly—all nervousness (the nervousness that sometimes creeps in when I have to constantly refer to and fumble my notes)—disappears and I manage to discuss the text with the enthusiasm of a reader and writer, not that of a teacher paid to profess things at students. Over the course of 80 minutes, I discover things I didn’t know about the text, I analyze formal structures, narrative arcs, and I understand, and enjoy, the book on a much deeper level than if I had simply written a lecture based on my usual “reading” of the book. Of course the students are an immeasurable help. They sense my enthusiasm and are in turn enthusiastic, inquisitive, flexible, and for the most part, truly interested.

Prepare less, teach more.