Last updated on November 26, 2023
Writing is how I relate to myself and to others. Writing has been a part of my life since at least the second grade when I started to make little books and write short stories. I tried to start a novel in the fifth grade, which I still dream of writing. I kept writing and filling notebooks over the years. I wrote plays, I wrote poetry. Words on a page or screen, trying to understand how life works and why I feel so apart from the people around me.
Writing is what I wanted to do, but I’m good at other things. I’m good at math and science. I’m good with technology. I am fascinated by economics, psychology, and business, three interconnected fields.
Writing is what I convinced myself to study, so I tried to combine my interests under the umbrella of writing. I studied journalism, and I do write a technology column for a newspaper supplement. The column appears on Poet Ponders the Digital after a year or so. (I’m in the process of uploading every column since 2006 to the blog.)
Writing led me to pursue my master’s degree, my doctorate, and my MFA, each of them linked more to writing than they should have been, I suppose. Yes, I should have pursued degrees in what I do well, not what I wanted to do. I enjoy sports, but I accepted I wasn’t going to be an athlete.
Advice to “chase your dreams” should include, “As long as you also have the skills and personality suited to those dreams.”
I am a good programmer and technician. I’m a good geek.
I’m probably not a good writer — certainly not a great writer. My plays are mediocre, too, or I would have managed to refine one for publication. Like thousands of others, I imagined I would write something others would enjoy reading or seeing. Strangely enough, it was this blog, The Autistic Me, that had a half-million hits one year. Maybe most of those were bots, but that was in 2009, before bots took over the Web.
I pursued degrees with the dream of writing and creating art for stage and screen. Those degrees naturally led to teaching. Technically, my degrees aren’t “writing” but they are in disciplines that led to teaching writing.
Teaching is what mediocre writers do. There are great teachers, and there are great writers who choose to teach, but mediocre writers… we have to teach because it isn’t like newspapers are on a hiring binge. (And I would have enjoyed being a business or technology reporter full-time.)
What I ended up teaching for the fall 2019 semester was “College Composition” and I struggle with teaching academic writing. I would love to teach many subjects, and I’d love to research those subjects. But first-year college composition isn’t one of the subjects I love. Not even close. I’d love to teach scriptwriting, media production, and media business. I’d enjoy teaching computer programming, statistics, and a dozen other topics. I’d love to teach the rhetoric of economics. Visual rhetoric would be a blast to teach, linking back to media production, psychology, and business.
My mind loves to connect disciplines. That’s why I’d love to study and teach so many things…
But, I never wanted to teach how to write academic papers in MLA or APA format.
I admire my colleagues. They want to help students succeed and they want to help students learn about academic writing. My colleagues embrace the jargon and the culture of “Composition and Rhetoric” while I feel like even more of an outsider.
I spent 60 to 70 hours a week during the fall trying to succeed in a teaching post I didn’t enjoy. Maybe that’s what most jobs are like, but it was painful. So many others would love to have been teaching composition, while I was waiting to teach something else.
Thankfully, I will be teaching something else in the spring and I’ll be able to work around my interests. No academic writing. No APA or MLA papers. Even if I work the same hours, I’ll enjoy them more.
I’m a mediocre writer, and now I know I’m a mediocre teacher of academic writing.