Tag: teachers

We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Sarah Beddow

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a memoir-in-poems where a teacher’s emotions are vividly rendered through scene, metaphor, dialogue, and commentary on the language that dominates public school systems. As the text progresses, the teacher—who once identified with bright color and bodily awareness—watches herself disappear. The aim of the text, then, is to proclaim personhood in the face of a system that strips it.

Reading Dispatches from Frontier Schools is like watching the strongest person you know rupture. It makes you ache. Thankfully, the salvation this teacher clutched was poetry. Now, the world has this book—a serrated testament to the reality of teaching, a crucial read.

In this interview, Sarah Beddow gives shape to her hopes and process with writing Dispatches.

Text on a gray background reads "Dispatches from Frontier Schools." "Sarah Beddow" is written below that in the lower right corner. Above the text is a black and white image of a blurred-out teacher behind a desk. They are in a cluttered classroom, with two short trashcans in front of their desk.

Marah Hoffman: Teachers are rarely afforded the space to consider their wants and needs. Dispatches creates this crucial space—making sound where there has been noxious silence. Was diminishing such silence one of your goals when you set out to write Dispatches from Frontier Schools? Could you describe your motivations for writing the text?

Sarah Beddow: My job at Frontier was so difficult; I cried all the time and worked all the time. Work and cry, cry and work. Explaining why it was so hard often felt futile. I would sit down with one of a rotating cast of principals, and we would try to figure out how to streamline the work, usually by doing one of those important-urgent matrices. But the fact was that the work in the important/urgent quadrant alone was overwhelming. The worst part was that even though I would stump my principals with the course load they had saddled me with—proving my point that it was obviously too much—I still came away from the meetings feeling like nothing sounded that horrible, and I was just whining.

Back in the real world, I felt like my family and friends didn’t really understand either. Mostly they wondered why I didn’t just quit, and it was hard to explain how wonderful it feels when a lesson just hits or when you have a silly or heartfelt moment with a student you really like.

So, I started writing these poems as Facebook posts, titling each one “Dispatch” and numbering it in sequence. The goal started on a very personal, limited scale: see me and hear me, my loved ones. The goal remains personal in that I want people to understand my story

But I do think there is a whole missing cultural narrative about what it is like to teach day in and day out. I hope this book does some work towards broadening the narratives possible about teaching. (As an aside, Abbott Elementary is doing a great job of looking at the day-to-day lives of teachers. It is also much funnier than I am, and I’m not surprised that people are into it.)

MH: The details you include from your life are so palpable and jagged—their realness undeniable. I’m sure this was no easy feat since the days you describe occurred years ago. What was your process for recreating these experiences on the page? Did you keep journals while you were teaching? I also invite you to discuss your use of epigraphs while answering this question if you’d like.

SB: I drafted at least three-quarters of these poems on the day the events occurred. I also had a growing collection of scraps—post-its, unused half-handouts—where I wrote down the “moves” of a poem as the connections and resonances came to me, helping me write most of the remainder within weeks or months of the events happening. By the time I was in year four or so, I knew there was an arc to the story. By the time the pandemic set in during my fifth year at Frontier, I knew that reality had just given me an ending. From there, I ordered and arranged and looked for the holes that needed to be filled in. (See a picture of the whole manuscript, taped to my closet and colored coded, on my publisher Riot in Your Throat’s blog.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest hole was levity—all the love, friendship, and good work, but also the silliness. I wrote those final poems based on memory and all those little scraps of paper.

As to the epigraphs, I have a very practical answer: the book is filled with them because I taught English literature and lived with the same core set of texts over many years. I was very fortunate in that I got to choose my own books to teach, so I taught all stuff I love. I mean, except Hamlet, which felt more like an expediency given my students had to take an AP Lit test at the end of the year. But after five years of Hamlet, I even love that play! I still quote Hamlet pretty often—I literally can’t help it, the lines are inside of me. Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is similarly embedded deep in my brain and heart. It was before I taught it, but now I think I will have chunks of it memorized until I die. My teaching was in conversation with those texts. It made sense to me, as I wrote, that my poems would also be in conversation with them.

MH: Language is a notable theme. Throughout Dispatches, you discuss how administrators patrol the language surrounding education, believing this will affect outcomes. For example, there is a shift to referring to students as “scholars.” Why is it important to consider the language used in school systems in a creative work about education?

SB: I am always a words person. I think it’s a reach to say that every word a person utters reveals something about them, but I don’t take people’s word choices lightly. The words that institutions use are especially telling because they are chosen very carefully, and they often work to insulate the institution from deserved criticism. I find the idea that you can call kids “scholars” and that this alone will change how everyone sees and treats them so fucked up. It’s a move that seems progressive and dedicated on the surface but in reality is distancing and weirdly dehumanizing. Students are not scholars! They are kids! And kids need things like art and music, physical activity, joy, and socializing. They need recess and access to green spaces. Scholars, however, do not need those things. Good thing, too, because the high schools of Frontier did not have robust arts programs, nor did my kids have access to fresh air during the day.

MH: The word “body” is used often, increasing in amount as the text progresses. This repetition is what I assume to be the attempted antidote to Dispatches’ cover art: a woman turned blur within the classroom. Would you be willing to expound upon the importance of the word “body” in this collection?

SB: I have always lived very much in my body. I was a gymnast from an early age, spending many hours in the gym. By the time I was a teenager, I had a very healthy libido and indulged it pretty much whenever I could. I have always understood that my body and my face are the way I move through the world. I’ve never been able to disappear wholly into my mind or my accomplishments. I write from my body because that’s the only way I know how.

Having a body while teaching is fraught. It’s an ordeal just to have enough time to go to the bathroom, and you often spend most of your day working a room or patrolling hallways. But teaching high school is especially fraught, because the students are increasingly aware of their own bodies and their bodies’ needs. Acknowledging that is like a third rail in educational spaces—often for good reason—but it was always hard for me to miss entirely. I once made an offhand remark about sex (the most generic remark, to be clear) and a student made an “ew” face and looked just shocked. “There are pictures of my kids on the wall!” I said, to which the student replied that it was gross that parents have sex. That was a real arrival for me, to finally be old enough to be seen as a “parent.” My years teaching before Frontier were marked by many high school boys hitting on me because I looked so very young. (Always a yikes!).

All of which is to say, I experienced teaching as intensely embodied, in part because I knew that the institution would rather I was some kind of robot and in part because the job literally put me on my ass more than once. It’s impossible to work that hard and not have your body give out. The longer I taught, the more it became crucial to me to acknowledge and own my physical needs as a kind of resistance.

MH: Motherhood is mentioned a few times in Dispatches. I am sure many other teachers struggle with being a mother and leading a classroom—“an artificial matriarchal space” (17). What was your thought process as you determined the presence you wanted motherhood to have in this text? 

SB: I felt so guilty the whole time I was at Frontier, because I knew I was working too hard and missing out on my kids at home. I was not the best mother I could be to my own kids while I was teaching full-time. But also, I could never let go of the fact that other parents entrusted their kids to me (and my colleagues). That was always the impossible bind: I couldn’t do less because these are other people’s kids. I could not separate the responsibility I feel for my own kids from the one I felt toward my students. But I also couldn’t meet everyone’s needs. Those competing responsibilities come from the same place inside me, so there was no other way to write but to include my mothering.

MH: There are different types of danger described: the immediate, bodily danger of bomb threats and potential shooters; the slow-kill danger of losing your personhood within a suppressive school system; and the pervasive danger of being a woman in society. Why was it essential to include all three forms of danger? How do they compound each other in the life of an educator?

SB: I kind of feel like my answer to all of these questions is the same: all of these things are always completely wrapped up in each other. I taught 12th-grade English, and the course was designed around critical lenses. We studied feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and reader response theories. I planned and taught my courses with my whole self, so I saw resonances among the theories, our texts, and current events all the time—and so brought them into the classroom. My students did, too. I taught a unit for a few years where students analyzed the goals and functions of American public education, and the kids had many eye-opening realizations. I had so many conversations with kids—in that unit but also more generally—where they knew they were being disserved by Frontier, but also that it wasn’t really better anywhere else. And they knew we as their teachers were getting ground up, too. Intersectionality was a topic of study, but it was also how all of us lived our lives because if you are in a failing institution, it’s hard not to see the cracks.

MH: I ask this question on behalf of writers who relate to the unrelenting absence of time to write. How did you find the time to write Dispatches?

SB: I wrote these poems because I was compelled, because it was not a choice. I wrote them as pain cries and flung them out into the universe. Most of the poems were written on stolen time, a half hour at a time. Then it was a pandemic, and my parents supported us financially so I wouldn’t have to return to a school building without knowing what the dangers were. That also meant I had—all of a sudden—an enormous amount of time.

MH: Finally, how did you consider audience while writing Dispatches? Is there anything specific you hope fellow educators glean from the text?

SB: I thought very hard about audience when I was assembling and revising the text, which led me to the first poem “Dispatch re: You.” I really wanted to write to the people who thought I was a saint for teaching in urban schools. I felt it was important to complicate the narrative about myself as a teacher—just as much or more so than it was to (continually) argue for the humanity of my students. As I point out in that poem, in conversation I would often try to humanize my kids for others, usually by pointing out that seniors everywhere get really excited about prom! They also get nervous about college, cheat by reading SparkNotes instead of the novel, and generally fuck around and find out. But I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the perception that I was out there Dangerous-Minds-ing and saving lost souls or some such. My students have stories and agency of their own and they do not need me to humanize them. They are human all on their own. My story, however, is mine to tell. And teachers are, sadly, I think, always in need of humanizing.

Many teachers have read the book and told me they recognize their experiences in it. I couldn’t ask for more, really, than having another educator read my story and say, “Yes. This is how it is. I rarely see anyone talk about it, so thank you for saying it out loud.” I’m still kind of waiting for someone to tell me about the mistakes I made when teaching or the mistakes I made when writing about my students; I think I will carry that anticipation forever. But I’ve made my peace with it (to the best of my ability). I did the best job I could as a teacher. And I did the best job I could when writing the book. Those mistakes are mine and I will own them—that in itself is an essential part of the project.

Thanks for all of these wonderful questions and your careful reading of my book. It means the world to me!

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is available at Riot in Your Throat

A woman in a colorful tie-dye dress and leggings sits on an orange and green chair. She has a short pixie cut and wears glasses with a clear frame.

Sarah Beddow is a poet, essayist, and mother. She is the author of the memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools (Riot in Your Throat) and the chapbook What’s pink & shiny/what’s dark & hard (Porkbelly Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Bone Bouquet, Rogue Agent, GlitterMOB, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere, and she is on the board of Awesome Pittsburgh, which grants money – cold hard cash with no strings attached – to fund awesome projects in the Pittsburgh area. Find her online at impolitelines.com.

A blonde woman stands in front of tulips, a bronze statue, and a building. She is wearing a white top and smiling widely.

Marah Hoffman is a 2022 graduate with a bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Lebanon Valley College. In college, she served as co-poetry editor of Green Blotter Literary Magazine and Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society president. From the LVC English department, she won The Green Blotter Writer Award. She has been featured in journals including Green Blotter, LURe Journal, Oakland Arts Review, Beyond Thought, and Asterism. Now, she works for the Sundress Academy for the Arts, where she enjoys immersing herself in a new and radiant literary community. Marah loves creative nonfiction, intertextuality, whimsicality, cats, lattes, distance running, and adding to her personal lexicon. Her favorite word changes nearly every week. 

A Roundtable Discussion with David Ebenbach, Kathy Flann, West Moss, and Joselyn Lewis

Self-Authorship in the Writing Classroom: Helping Our Students Find Themselves

The world after college graduation—jobs, relationships, citizenship—demands a lot more from graduates than just knowledge and skills. Our students, if they’re going to thrive, are going to need some real self-awareness and the ability to make their own decisions. In order to get there, they’ll have to engage in a process of what psychologist Robert Kagan calls “self-authorship.” This means developing (in the words of education scholar Marcia Baxter Magolda) “the internal capacity to define one’s beliefs, identity, and social relations.” In other words, our students need to let go of the way that they’ve been defined by others and decide for themselves who they’re going to be in the world. Luckily, writing classes can be the perfect place for people to work toward becoming the authors of their lives, and teachers are in a great position to help.

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West Moss

When you were a student, did you have any academic experiences that were significant in your own process of self-authorship, by either hindering or spurring your efforts to define yourself?

David Ebenbach: In high school I took a creative writing class taught by a wonderful woman named Carole Nehez, and she did one of the most important things you can do for a person: she helped me find my voice. She helped her students in a number of different ways. First of all, she didn’t line us up in rows facing her at the front of the room; she put the chairs in a circle and we all sat in the circle together, which told us we all had important things to say, that we all could teach. Then, class conversations were free-wheeling and open and spontaneous, and she followed our lead when it was productive. One day, for example, it was raining outside and I asked her at the beginning of class if some of us could run around in the rain for a few minutes before settling into our chairs, and she let us do it. About half the class went, and we came back soaked and energized. But the most important thing was the writing, and particularly the journal writing. Mrs. Nehez required us to keep a journal, and encouraged us to write about anything and everything. She mandated a space for self-exploration. She said we had to do it, so we did.

Kathy Flann: The first experience I remember vividly related to writing and self-awareness is when I wrote a paper in high school about Julius Caesar, and the teacher accused me of plagiarizing it because it was so good. I was both insulted and flattered. I’d been going to Shakespeare plays with my parents since I was a child, and I’d had a lot of time to develop my own thoughts about them. I knew, from that accusation of being beyond my years, that I had come up with my own ideas. They weren’t canned. Even though it was a terrible experience, it was also an important moment. I often think of it when I teach. I remember how much one comment can affect someone.

West Moss: In one of my college lit classes, we were told to keep a journal of our thoughts about what we were reading. I met with my professor one day and he sat and read through my journal, quietly turning the pages. He hesitated and read something out loud to me that I had written. He said, “Is this YOUR idea?” I was confused and said that yes, it was. He got a tear in his eye and a big smile on his face. He sat forward and said, “West, what a brilliant insight.” I was eighteen and I burst into tears. It was as though someone had finally seen what I had suspected but had been unable to confirm until then: namely, that I had ideas that were worthwhile. This was a turning point in my sense of myself as a student and thinker, with ideas of my own to contribute to the larger discussion.

Joselyn Lewis: During the last semester of my senior year in college, I was writing a thesis as part of the graduation requirements in my major. The professor leading the thesis capstone seminar was a very established and respected faculty member in the department, someone I admired greatly and found to be an engaged and supportive educator, but also someone who intimidated me. I disagreed with his opinions at times, but struggled with confidence as to whether or not I had something of value to say and how to express my perspective to him. One day during a whole class discussion, while we were workshopping my classmate’s paper, I suggested that the main premise of her thesis was based on some mistaken cultural assumptions. When my professor supported my classmate’s position, the discussion turned into a direct debate with him and I realized I was very passionate about my take on the issues. I stood my ground and while he did not come around to my perspective, I left class shaking from having tried, but still convinced that I was right.

That afternoon, I had a scheduled check-in with my advisor where I relayed the events from class earlier in the day. He could hear the emotion in my voice and the importance of this argument to me. He did not tell me that he agreed with me or that he thought I was right, but for me, he did something even better. After he heard me out, the first thing he said was “Have you ever considered going to graduate school? I think you should.” Graduate school was actually not on my radar prior to that exchange, but my advisor’s reaction to me at that moment changed everything. I started seeing myself as someone who was capable of that level of academic work and as someone who had something to contribute. It was very significant.

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David Ebenbach

How can writing—and particularly creative writing—help people on their journey toward self-authorship?

Kathy Flann: I think a creative writing workshop is the one place where students really do make their own decisions about the work they produce. Typically, faculty are most sincere in those classes about the carte blanche to make the work what they want it to be, and students sense that sincerity. They know the work is “real” in the sense that it could potentially be read by people just like them—fans of fiction. So they take the work of craft very seriously. They think of themselves as “real” writers in ways they may not in other disciplines.

Joselyn Lewis: I think writing can be supportive of our process of identity development and self-authorship in a number of ways. Writing can create space to slow down. That change in pace between writing and other ways we might communicate about ourselves and interact with others allows for a space that is more conducive to self-reflection and self-analysis. Also, writing, and perhaps creative writing in particular, requires an attention to voice in a way that often encourages the writer to work on finding their voice, recognizing and owning what kind of voice one has and how one wants to use it.

David Ebenbach: Some writing is direct self-authorship. For example, memoir and poetry can be places where you try to get a grip on your own story and make sense of it, and come to conclusions about it. It’s almost the same case with fiction and playwriting if it’s thinly veiled autobiography. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Even fiction that has no direct correspondence to your own life can spur the process of self-authorship. Maybe you drop a character into a moral conundrum and work them through it and, in so doing, discover how you feel about that situation; maybe you just can’t stop writing about loss (or connection, or faith, or struggle, or whatever it is); maybe you let characters do things you would never dare to do (or think you would never dare to do). In each case you learn something about what matters to you. Writing allows you to talk about the world, or a world, anyway, and then you learn—by comparison, by contrast—about your own world.

West Moss: I think I answer this below.

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Kathy Flann

How can a teacher support the process of self-authorship?

Joselyn Lewis: From my experience, educators who are able to create intentional ways for students to connect academic material to their own lived experiences provide students with both powerful opportunities to further develop their own self-authorship and powerful learning experiences. Some faculty I work with do this by assigning writing assignments that explicitly ask students to bring themselves into conversation with course material—a faith autobiography for a religion class, or a weekly reflection journal, for example. The writing process is a supportive element as well as the sharing between student and teacher and what that sharing sets up in terms of the student feeling “seen” by the teacher. Another way to support the process of students’ self-authorship is to model or share experiences from our own trajectory toward self-authorship. It’s particularly helpful if teachers are willing to share some of the obstacles or difficulties in the process, so students can see the complexity, potential messiness, and non-linear nature of identity development and movement toward self-authorship.

Kathy Flann: What I do is spend the first 3-6 weeks, depending on the level of the student, assigning ungraded work. Every time the student says, “Did you like it? Did I do well on it?” I say “Do YOU like it?” I explain as many times as it takes that they’re not writing for me. I say, “If you don’t like your work, probably no one else will like it, either.” I use my own writing experiences as examples in class, so that they will understand that we are all writers. We are just at different points on our journeys. I love it the most when I sit side-by-side with students who’ve come to my office and I ask them questions, “What does this guy want? Does he have a job? What does he do? Who is his family? What did he do yesterday? Why?” etc. It’s fun to see the student grasp that the answers are there in the mind. I think they also see that they, the students, are the only ones with the answers to these questions. I can guide, but I can’t provide the answers.

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Joselyn Lewis

David Ebenbach: I think teachers can help students grow into themselves in two ways: by making space for the process and by challenging them to engage. Like Carole Nehez, my high school creative writing teacher, you can set up the classroom and in-class time to bring out voices—sitting in a circle, using first names, letting students do a lot of the talking—and you can use exercises that invite exploration: discussions based around student perspectives and experiences, journal-writing, reflection papers, writing assignments that ask them to tell childhood stories. In terms of writing exercises, I like to start with emotionally easy stuff (e.g., write a detailed physical description of a place you associate with your childhood) and then move to more fraught prompts (e.g., write a scene in which someone you really don’t like does something unexpectedly nice).

In some classes, I build up to an assignment called “Write the story you’re not allowed to write,” which I first encountered as a sentence in a Janet Burroway textbook and which I’ve elaborated on quite a bit. Some of the options for the assignment: “Write a fictionalized version of some true events that you are not supposed to reveal to the world….Write about something that is taboo for you….Don’t pick what’s taboo for others—go for what makes you squirm….Write sympathetically from the point of view of a protagonist who makes you genuinely uncomfortable. This would be the kind of person that secretly on some level you can relate to or might even wish to be, even though officially you completely disapprove of this kind of person.” Nobody is required to do this assignment—I give them an alternative—but almost everybody chooses to do it, and usually they find that they’re discovering important things, surviving those discoveries, growing from those discoveries, and, on top of that, writing the most promising thing they’ve written all semester long.

West Moss: There are ways to make the classroom feel safe for students to share their ideas, and to discover what they think about the world. Certainly listening carefully and giving genuine supportive responses is key, but also pushing them to write about their own worlds is often fruitful. In creative writing classes, I often begin class with brief (2-3 minute) in-class writing exercises, where I ask them to write about things they’ve noticed that morning, or interactions from years ago that they still think about. When shared, these things help build a community within the classroom, but they can also show beginning CW students that their own lives provide rich material for writing.

I have an assignment called “The Lies Our Characters Tell.” We read a short story together, something very short like John Cheever’s “Reunion,” for example, and look at how a particular character is lying (often to themselves) about themselves. For instance, the father in that story says that he cares about his son, but his actions show that he doesn’t. These small moments of dishonesty in characters can be revelatory for students, and demonstrate the kinds of inner conflicts we want our characters to display.

Next, students make a list of the stories they told about themselves when they last met someone new. What clothes did they wear and what “story” were they trying to tell with those clothes? Were they trying to look sexy, athletic, wealthy? Did they want to look like they didn’t care in some way, while actually caring very deeply about what people thought of them? Could they see the inner-conflict inherent in some of their own choices? Then I ask them to write down some of the actual stories they tell about themselves. Do they lead with their summer in France, or do they lead with their most recent awful break-up? Do they find stories to tell that make it clear they come from money, or do they prefer to immediately disclose that they were adopted, and why?

Then they’re asked to reflect on what these clashes between who they really are and who they portray themselves to be tell them about themselves. Does it reveal that they want something they don’t feel they can have? Does it reveal their senses of inadequacy or mastery in some way? One’s sense of identity, and one’s own understanding of small, potent conflicts in their own world, are essential underpinnings of compelling writing, but perhaps also of being a full human being.

These kinds of insights lead to several good outcomes. First, beginning CW students often feel they have to rely on large conflicts (explosions, wars, the death of a protagonist) in order to build tension in their stories. These exercises show them the kinds of small tensions that are real and universal, and that will help them to build characters that their readers will care about. More importantly, though, they help students in their own awareness of “self,” which is a critical sense for writers to develop. These are the kinds of tools, too, that I like to think I am giving them to use in life in general…the skill of reflection, of “noticing,” and a sense that their lives, and ideas, are thrilling and complex and moving enough to be at the center of their writing, and of their consciousness.

David Ebenbach is the author of six books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, including, most recently, the poetry collection We Were the People Who Moved and the story collection Into the Wilderness. He is a Professor of the Practice in Creative Writing at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

Kathy Flann‘s short story collection, Get a Grip, won the George Garrett Award and was released by Texas Review Press. A previous collection, Smoky Ordinary, won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. For five years, she taught creative writing at the University of Cumbria in England, where she created mini-courses for the BBC’s Get Writing website and served on the board of the National Association of Writers in Education. She is an associate professor at Goucher College in Maryland.

Joselyn Lewis is an Associate Director for Inclusive Teaching and Learning Initiatives at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. She leads the Engelhard Project and the Doyle Faculty Fellowship Program, which promote curricular and pedagogical innovation on issues of well-being, diversity, and inclusive pedagogy.

West Moss teaches creative writing at William Paterson University and at Gotham in New York City. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Salon.com, Brevity, and elsewhere. Her collection of short stories, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, was published by Leapfrog Press.