Last December, on the Saturday after the last day of classes at our college, my husband and I participated in a one-day “Writer as Reader” workshop at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking. The theme of this workshop was “The Pride of Wisdom” and our work focused on the novel Frankenstein and Ray Kurzweil’s essay “The Coming Merger of Mind and Machine.”

We decided to attend this workshop because we will be team-teaching the course Philosophy and Science Fiction in the Fall 2014 semester and wanted to improve the writing strategies we employ in the course. In these one-day workshops, the leader models the use of numerous writing strategies in the classroom, with participants filling the role of student in order to experience different practices first-hand.

As I was performing the workshop’s opening writing assignment, I realized that this was the first time I had been a student since my last graduate school courses ended in the Spring 2004 semester. The role felt very familiar, yet it was filtered through my six years of experience as a full-time professor. This bifurcated view was reenforced by my dual roles in the workshop itself: I was a student using writing exercises to explore the texts I had read at the same time I was a teacher learning to use these writing exercises in my own classroom. There were times when I was uncomfortable with some of the writing I was being asked to do; at other times, I was excited at how easily the words came as I scribbled away in my notebook. The workshop leader did a fine job, the other participants were intelligent and thoughtful, and the experience was one I would love to repeat.

When we got back to Brooklyn we plunged right into final exams, and that last exhausting push to get our final grades in on time, so I didn’t really think too much more about the experience at Bard until late in our Winter Intersession break. As I looked at ways I might use some of the workshop’s writing practices in my own classroom, I found myself thinking about the Education majors I have in my courses. When a student majors in Education, s/he also chooses an area of concentration (English, History, Mathematics), and must take a series of courses in that concentration, so I usually have a number of Education majors in each of my classrooms every semester.

What has always impressed me about my Education majors is the responsibility they feel for the material they are studying. They know that, very soon, they will be teaching these texts to their own students, and using the literary theories they studied in my classroom to better understand how to teach those texts. When faced with a difficult work, Education majors draw upon both their previous English courses and their Education courses in order to try to understand what the author is saying. They are not afraid to say they don’t understand something, to ask me to clarify a point or go over an interpretation again, to come into class with a question they weren’t able to find the answer to.

As a corollary to this sense of responsibility, Education majors tend to be, shall we say, highly structured. (Full disclosure: I am this way myself.) They want you to tell them exactly what you want, when you want it, and how you want it done. They are most comfortable with detailed prompts for writing assignments, prompts that describe not only the texts they need to examine but also the topic they should deal with and, if at all possible, at least a hint of the thesis they need to prove.

Compare this with English majors. They revel in ambiguity. When I teach poetry, and say to the class, “I’m not at all sure what the poet means in these lines,” I can see the English majors’ eyes light up as they begin to run through possible interpretations. English majors dislike those detailed prompts for writing assignments; what they like most of all is to be asked what they think about a text, with an open-ended assignment prompt that could lead them in a number of possible directions.

Now, obviously I am speaking in generalizations here. There are highly-structured English majors and non-structured Education majors. And in no way do I mean to imply that being one way is better or worse than the other. What I am saying is that, when I am faced with a classroom of both Education and English majors, I need to find teaching strategies that not only engage each type of student, but that also — at least occasionally — shake the Education and English majors out of their comfort zones. To rattle the Education majors a little, I like to use a very open-ended prompt for formal essays, something like, “Using one of the themes we have discussed in class, discuss at least two of the texts we have read this semester.” To do the same to the English majors, I design at least one very detailed group presentation project, where the prompt is highly structured. And to make both groups at least a little uncomfortable, I use in-class writing exercises such as the ones our workshop leader taught us at Bard.

Thing is, a number of my English majors are going to become teachers as well. So along with the poems, novels, stories, plays and films that I teach, I also try to teach teaching as well. I try to make my pedagogy as transparent as possible, explaining the purpose behind each exercise, asking my students why I might employ a particular strategy at a particular moment in the classroom. The idea of the “teachable moment” is starting to become a cliché, but I do believe that there are things that happen in the classroom (things both planned and unplanned) that can be used to help teach my students how to teach.

So when the leader of a construction crew working on a roof just outside my classroom knocked on the window and proceeded, along with his fellow carpenters, to climb through that window carrying a very, very long ladder, I asked my students what they would do if that happened in their junior high classroom. Or when I was ill last semester and one of my students offered to teach the lesson, I said, “Yes.” (She did a brilliant job, by the way.) It is why I will ask, “Education majors, why would I not allow you to pick which peer group you are in?” or “Education majors, why would I structure the exercise this way instead of that way?” and then turn around and ask the same question of my English majors.

I am a teacher, the child of teachers, the wife of a teacher. I am, perforce, a little biased, but I truly believe that teaching is a calling. Obviously, we aren’t in it for prestige or money or fame. We teach because we believe education is important, and I can think of no better legacy than preparing the next generation of young men and women to take over our classrooms. Teaching the teachers is one way to do that.