First Person

Becoming a Learner Again

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By James M. Lang

A few years ago I hit upon a brilliant way to capitalize on all of the time I spent listening to my children make strange and amusing remarks about the world: I would become a children's book author, and translate my wacky family life into published gold.

So I wrote a couple of children's stories, one of which was eventually accepted for publication in a magazine. I then conceived the even better idea that, despite my lack of formal or informal training in the visual arts, I would learn to draw, so that I could both write and draw my own series of children's books.

I signed up for a drawing class at the local art museum, where it took me all of about two classes to discover that I had very little aptitude for drawing. I liked the idea of drawing; I found the actual process much less exciting, as well as technically difficult.

Still, I had signed up for the course, so I soldiered on. In each weekly session, the instructor would briefly introduce a new technique or idea about drawing, and then we would spend the rest of the time working on a new assignment under her guidance.

About halfway through the course I noticed a significant difference between my ability to draw in class, under the instructor's supervision, and my ability to draw at home, away from her presence.

I felt much more confident in class, knowing that I could raise my hand and consult her, and my in-class drawings reflected that confidence. At home, I couldn't suppress the fear that my first strokes might be the drawing equivalent of a basic addition error at the start of a complex mathematical problem, and that anxiety left me frozen.

Of course I knew that, were I to take drawing more seriously, I would need to learn to draw on my own. But I could see that, as a beginner, what helped me most was the time I spent in class, working on the skill I was there to learn, under the instructor's direct support. I also appreciated that, in class, I could look to either side of me and compare my work with that of my peers, a process that the teacher sometimes formalized by having us critique one another's work.

That same semester, I was teaching a nonfiction writing course. The relevance of my experience in the drawing class to that writing class did not appear to me as quickly as you might expect, but I caught on eventually.

Before I began to see the parallels, I spent a lot of class time analyzing how the writing techniques I wanted to teach appeared in the works of great writers. I would show the students model sentences on overheads, and have them hunt down other model sentences in the books and essays they had read. Then I would send them off on their own to reproduce those techniques in their papers.

But when I started to think about what was happening to me as a learner in that drawing class, I began to question my strategy. I could see clearly that, had my art instructor spent most of the class showing me slides of drawings by the masters, it would have done me very little good. I understood what she was asking us to do within the first few minutes; what I found difficult was doing it on my own, on a blank piece of paper in front of me.

I began to reconfigure the way I allotted my time in the classroom. I cut back on the amount of time we spent talking about writing and alloted more to letting students actually write in class.

Despite my fears that students might interpret that as slacking on my part, no one complainted to the dean about wasted class time. And the number of students who raised their hands to ask me questions or seek my help convinced me that I was doing something right.

I even began to modify my teaching in my literature classes. Again, instead of modeling for them the skill of interpretation through lectures or carefully orchestrated discussions, I began to make more frequent use of worksheets that required the students to work in groups to develop interpretations on their own, before I stepped in and offered any guidance or perspective.

I don't want to argue here about the validity of my pedagogical transformation. I want to draw a different lesson from my experience in that art class, one that I have learned another time or two since then -- the importance, for those of us who profess in higher education, of occasionally putting ourselves in educational situations in which we are the learners.

I suspect that many of us do this already, since those of us who choose to spend our lives in higher education probably all share restless minds. I have colleagues in my department who have recently taken lessons in horseback riding, and yoga, and one who even enlisted his border collie and spent time working with the dog to learn to herd sheep.

So the corollary lesson here is to ensure that we use our experiences as learners to reflect on our teaching routines and attitudes when we are back in our more familiar role.

I used to get frustrated at students in my lower-division writing classes who would tell me that they didn't like writing, or at students who clearly just wanted to fulfill the college-writing requirement and move on.

I must make them love writing, I would think to myself. How can I instill in them the burning love of the written word that gives my life meaning?

But the last thing I would have wanted for my art teacher to do was to feel disappointed or frustrated at my lukewarm response to drawing. It had nothing to do with her. I thought she was a great teacher, and I really liked her. I just didn't like drawing all that much.

I understand now that it is not my job to make all students yearn desperately for the written word. I should display my own enthusiasm, but for those who don't connect to the written word in the same way, I am content these days to help them learn the basic writing skills they need to succeed in their academic and professional lives, and to send them on their way. I don't take their attitude as personally as I once did, and I suspect that allows me to help them more effectively.

Similarly, I used to feel real impatience with those students who would come to my office and tell me that they just didn't get either a writing or an interpretation we'd discussed. I explained it in class, I felt like saying, and we went over it together. What could you possibly not get about it?

But on a number of occasions, in my drawing class, I simply didn't get it. No matter how hard I worked at some specific technique, my drawing just didn't look like everyone else's. I felt a bit embarrassed about it, and -- despite the teacher's willingness to help me individually -- I didn't want to hold the class up, so I claimed to understand when I really didn't.

I'm much more understanding these days of students who don't get it, even if I haven't developed any sure-fire techniques for helping them past their mental roadblocks. At least I understand how they are feeling, and I hope that motivates me to sit a bit longer with them, exhausting every method I can think of to open their eyes to the material or the technique.

I learned all of those lessons in my drawing class, but they are important enough that I know I need to relearn them on a regular basis. I'm not sure it matters much in what context I learn them, just that I become a learner in a formal way again. I'm eyeing scuba-diving lessons for the summer.