No, the title of today’s blog is not a misprint.  It’s the end of May rather than September, and next week, at eleven AM on Monday morning, I’ll be starting school.

It’s been more than 40 years since I’ve set foot in a classroom as a teacher.  As a librarian I did five years of storytelling in twenty-six k-6 classrooms, but storytelling isn’t necessarily teaching.  Or maybe it is.

My second year at Tucson’s Pueblo High School was also my last year of classroom teaching.  The school had morning and afternoon sessions back then.  The first year, teaching senior English in the morning session, was, in my own personal grade book, a complete disaster.  I was a beginning teacher, and my students were only a few years younger than I was.  They ate me alive.  I did NOT do a good job.

The second year, I asked to transfer to the afternoon session where I would be dealing with younger kids, freshmen and sophomores.  That was a better fit.  The most challenging student for me that year was long lanky kid named Fernando Comacho.  (If anyone knows where Fernando is now, please put us in touch!)  At first, just like the previous year’s seniors, Fernando had me completely buffaloed.  He was always late to class.  He would be back grinding away at the pencil sharpener long after the bell rang and then saunter back to his desk while I stood up front grinding my teeth.  He never did any work.  He was flunking.

At Christmas break that year, I went back to Bisbee and touched bases with one of my teachers from Bisbee High School, Mrs. Rachel Riggins.  She had been widowed young and left to raise a daughter on her own.  That’s how she came to teach in Bisbee.  She was my home room teacher all through high school, my journalism teacher my junior year, and the school newspaper sponsor the next one, the year my best friend and I were co-editors of the Copper Chronicle.

During that Christmas vacation visit, she asked me how my teaching was going.  I told her it was fine, except for one student, Fernando.  “Tell me about him,” she suggested, and so I did.  She listened while I spilled out my whole litany of complaints about the guy.  When I finished, here’s what she said.  “Judy, if Fernando is failing as a student, you are failing as a teacher.  If Fernando is sitting in your classroom, ninety minutes a day, four days a week and not doing any work, you need to find out what he’s thinking about all that time and what he’s interested in.  Make an appointment to see him.  Do it at a time when he isn’t doing anything wrong.  And don’t have the appointment be in your classroom or office.  Talk to him out in the parking lot.  Find out what makes him tick.”

What did I have to lose?  And so, as soon as Christmas vacation was over, that’s exactly what I did.  I set up an appointment and met up with Fernando out in the parking lot.  I discovered that he spent every weekend playing drums with a band.  We went from the parking lot to the library where I helped him find a book–Gene Krupa’s biography.  The book report Fernando did on that was the first book report he ever did for me.  It may well have been the first book report he ever did. After that, he was no longer a pain in the you-know-what, and he did not fail my class

Years later, my first husband came home from getting a haircut in Tucson and told me he had run into one of my old students from Pueblo High School.  “Not Fernando Comacho,” I said.  But, of course, it was.  Fernando had asked my husband if his wife didn’t used to teach at Pueblo.  When he learned the answer was yes, Fernando said, “She was the best teacher I ever had.  After her, I graduated from high school, joined the Navy, and now I’m learning to be a barber.”  And all because of Rachel Riggins, an English teacher at Bisbee High School and someone Fernando never met.

So Monday of next week will be the first day of teaching my two week workshop, The Art and Business of Writing, at the University of Arizona, the very place where I was once barred from enrolling in a Creative Writing course.  Predictably, earlier this week I had a nightmare about teaching.  It was the first day of school.  I was supposed to be teaching in Bellevue.  Class was scheduled to start at 9:00 AM.  At five to nine, I was still in Seattle, on the wrong side of Lake Washington and miles away from where I was supposed to be.

Am I nervous about this?  You bet.  Will I be able to be an effective teacher?  Will I be able to make the class fun AND informative?  I’m sure the I’s in this class will be very close together, but the textbook I’ll be using will be the one I’ve developed over 30 years of living in writing’s school of hard knocks.

Years after I was refused admittance to the U of A’s Creative Writing program, another Creative Writing professor, one who followed the first, told me “Oh, we don’t do ANYthing with GENRE fiction here.  We only do LITERARY fiction.”  Emphasis his!!!

Guess which kind of fiction I’ll be teaching?  Do I expect to turn out any Hemingways or Faulkners?  Nope.  But I’d sure settle for a Danielle Steele or a John D. McDonald.

Wish me luck.  Now what did I do with my red pencil?

The Art and Business of Writing