Teach What You Don't Know

As a writer and teacher, I’m interested in both the gaps and overlaps between the two fields.

 

Not surprisingly, I feel most at home in front of my creative writing classes – I’ve studied craft formally, have read hundreds of books about the creative process, and have been practicing writing steadily for the past twenty years.

 

But this year, I have found myself in the strange position of teaching a film class – strange because I don’t own a television, haven’t watched a movie all the way through in years and know next to nothing about the art of filmmaking.

 

It’s a set-up for disaster.

 

And yet, oddly enough, the experience of teaching a class that I am in no way qualified to teach feels a lot like the experience of writing.

 

My wife – who's still bitter at me for not taking her to a single movie since our first date ten years ago – asked me, when I first signed up to teach this course, why on earth I would want to teach a class on film.

 

And my response – because I’ll have no idea what I’m doing – would have probably sounded much stranger if it weren’t the exact same answer that keeps me writing.

 

And even though the course, as a whole, has felt like a rough draft (a very public rough draft with a lot of grammatical errors), teaching it has offered me the pleasures and anxieties of not-knowing and that need to move forward with the faith that I’ll figure it out along the way – has reminded me that teaching, like writing, is a life-long apprenticeship.

 

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