Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

teacher staring back at me. A lazy teacher or a disengaged
teacher or simply an incompetent teacher. No. It is that I do
not see in that reflection the sort of writing teacher I had
worked so very, very hard to be, the writing teacher who exists,
to his students, as an inciter of, as Hélène Cixous wrote,
“understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible,
hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable” and as a
provoker of that experience with that “lightning region that
takes your breath away, where you instantaneously feel at sea
and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the
already-known.” Despite my hard work and despite my best
efforts, it didn’t happen for me.
Please allow me to pause for a moment. I do not want to
put before you a portrait of my teaching experiences that is
nothing but the withering on the vine of that “potential” and
“promise.” No. Again, I was not – am not - a “bad” writing
teacher. I believe, in many ways, I was a good writing teacher
and what made me a “good” writing teacher more than anything
else, I believe, was the fact that I saw myself as a writer more
than I saw myself as a teacher and, because of that, I believed
in writing. I believed in the transformative “potential” of
writing. I believed in the writing’s “promise” of triumph. And
I brought this “belief” with me to the classroom as a teacher of
writing. I expected a lot from those students’ writing and, in
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