Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit

I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].

I did not at any time think that I would have the opportunity to turn my hand to what has become my purpose as a scribe-on-secondment over the last four months: marshalling, writing and editing arguments in order to try and save as many of my colleagues’ jobs as the union can. This secondment under which I’ve been working has proved to be an exercise in socially-committed writing. It’s a sobering experience, in which my focus has by necessity shifted from the aesthetic to the pragmatic. (The office catchphrase as I go through draft documents is “it doesn’t have to be perfect, Megan”.) At the same time however, it’s a validation of my belief in the essay as a form. Well-turned arguments do make a difference in real-life situations.

This is fulfilling work, without a doubt, but challenging and scary too. A lot is at stake and the situation changes daily. For someone whose life for the last eight years has been measured in discrete teaching blocks of twelve to twenty-eight weeks, it’s been an experiential shift. It’s made me aware, once more, of the power that rests in the role of the teacher, as I’ve set aside the privilege of controlling my environment (the classroom) and the status of that position. This union summer has been so busy that even the final touchstone of my work-persona has been overturned: my usual painstaking control of how I come across to others. Working relationships feel more vulnerable, but yield more rewards, now that matters at hand require I lose that last level of measured self-consciousness.

After around four weeks on the job (not long before I got married) I started to pine for the classroom, for the finite measures of work and the opportunity to connect with people in a ritualised, contained way. There’s a lot of noise around teaching and it’s this that’s exhausting: the high-speed demands of marking, the way in which students sabotage their success, or find it sabotaged through no fault of their own, the irritants of hauling and carting technology around campus. I’d been teaching continuously for so long that I’d begun to mistake the noise for the thing itself, but even though they’re part and parcel, they’re not the same. So I’m taking a reduction in my secondment hours from February’s end in order to spend some time in the classroom try and get a better balance for myself. I hope I’ll be a better union delegate — and a better teacher — if I’ve got both my flamethrowers ablaze.

I’ve noticed, too, some signs that my teacher’s persona has bedded in, over the years, in ways that are working to my disadvantage. This is not dissimilar to the way in which five years of hard postgraduate yakka and the ironised way of life that I lived as a result once gave me a persona unsuitable for the pithy verbal jostlings of the staffroom. A good teacher, to my mind, has to interpret the atmosphere of the class continuously and with the focused prescience of a cold-reader. If the lecture or tutorial starts to drift, it’s up to the teacher to recast or recontextualise it so that the students stay with her. It’s a difficult and delicate act, but experience and tremendous amounts of concentration make it possible to do it almost imperceptibly in real time. The effect, for the student, is ideally trust and a sense of ease.

In union life, and indeed everyday life, this level of attention can be counterproductive, however, since in most situations I lack the role or authority to control events in this way, and when there’s a task to hand to which one is committed, the best strategy is usually to get on with it without too much retarding reflection. Three months of working linearly on urgent projects (and usually on multiple projects — linearly and in parallel, one might say) has reminded me not only of the necessity but also of the value in being able to get on with things free of the meta-chatter that’s the teacher’s internal monologue.

With this comes the setting aside of what was perhaps the last vestige of my student life: the sense that I am myself an elaborate fiction, without any true habits or abiding beliefs, a sort of postmodern fairy in plus-size pants. Industrial affairs have proved for me a great clarifier of my fundamental beliefs, a reacquaintance with a sense of justice that tweets away like an alarm clock and provides, in the absence of original metaphors, a moral compass for what I have to do. It’s a completely different back-story for an essayist to have, but it reassures me that the means I have to help others are available to me by virtue of my writing and teaching experience.