What's Up Readers?
Have you ever heard the expression: "Those who can't do, teach."? I don't like it. Not only is it demeaning to the teaching profession, it's also limiting. I have dreams of becoming a published writer, and there was a time when I believed that my dreams of writing were over because I started settling in the teaching profession. But the truth of the matter is that most professors are published writers.
Jay Parini's The Art of Teaching did a good job of showing the symbiotic relationship between teaching and writing. He writes that "Teaching- again, like writing- is a brave act of self-presentation" (6). Voice is important in both fields, and if Robert Frost did it then every teacher-writer out there can too.
Both professions have performative aspects involving different personas, content, and discipline. Parini believes that a "disciplined life is essential for a teacher and a writer [ because it ] invites the muse" (48). Teaching and writing also involve "clarification, classification, and persuasion: the art of rhetoric" (81).
Maybe ardent naysayers who read Parini's book will take to heart Ralph Waldo Emerson's insight that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" (106). Hopefully they will realize that those who can, DO TEACH!
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