This is the week that Fall 2011 evaluations of my MFA students’ work are due, and three of the four have been written and dispatched. It’s also the week teachers receive manuscripts to be workshopped at the residency that kicks off the Spring 2012 semester. Breathe out, breathe in. The “dip” between semesters, after one ends and before the next begins, has amounted to little more than an hour or two, and that’s fine. You wouldn’t want too much time to lapse between semesters, students, and teaching, even given all the other stuff that’s got to be attended to.

But this hour of peace — in the season of peace — does prompt me to look at the end of my first year of teaching and question and wonder.

Do I like teaching? I love teaching. There’s so much that satisfies. . . .

The ongoing task of gathering what I’ve learned — and what I feel — about language and writing. I find it makes me accountable to my own knowledge of craft. It’s a constant test and question of myself.

There’s the reading of so many texts, a focused, deeper reading than I may have attended to before, all in the service of helping to shape craft knowledge into a form deliverable to someone else.

There’s that flutter in the chest when I come across something really fine in a student’s work; you know what it is: it makes you want to jump up and walk around the room before sitting down to read more

No small part of teaching is the talk that surrounds and extends and argues it.

There’s the talk about work as if work is the only thing there is.

Am I good at teaching? Ffft! Not yet. I feel like a diviner in a room of scientists. Good writing too often seems to me to be unexplainable, a fact I notice when I try to explain it. It’s like describing air. The best teaching that I can do is probably to simply point at someone’s story and say, “There. Do you see it?”

In a seminar I gave last semester there was the embarrassing moment when I read a piece of Agee to the class and my commentary was a stifled choke. What good is that to a student? Still, I’m likely to do the same thing this time. I’m a rube in the city of learning but I do love it, and I can’t wait for it all to start up.