Inspiration Begets Inspiration
Teaching writing requires lots of inspiration. Devising ways to explain how to do something like write an academic, analytical essay at the college level, means spending countless hours thinking of ideas, planning them out, reading about what other people do and putting lesson plans together. Then once the idea’s fleshed out, you still need to create instructional guides, handouts, PowerPoint presentations, worksheets, group activities, homework assignments, lecture notes, and readings that will go with the idea. Then you have to think of ways to explain it again if the students don’t understand it the first time. But all of this doesn’t work, ever, or isn’t any fun at least, if that initial spark of inspiration doesn’t set the whole thing going in the first place.
Inspiration is what’s needed to foster ideas; it's the spark that allows ideas to begin and then sets them into motion. For me as a teacher, inspiration happens all the time: when I’m running, when I’m walking to the car and when I’m talking to other teachers. In order to be inspired, I have to be open to new ideas. I have to be willing to let go of what I know and what I’ve already tried. Being inspired means allowing myself to be in a moment where something clicks. It’s allowing my thoughts to mingle, form new shapes and then become new things entirely. Being inspired means wanting to get up and do something, to watch all the pieces combine.
Every day when I teach I have mini-moments of inspiration. All I have to do is listen to my students, read their work and watch how they respond to my example. I try to model being inspired to them as often as I can, often explaining what sparked a certain idea, what I was thinking about and how all the pieces fell into place, because this is basically what I’m asking them to do. Inspiration in this sense is a fundamental part of the classes I teach: I offer them mine in the hopes that they will then offer theirs. It seems to work best this way. It’s communal. Granted, it needs to see more of itself to flourish, but this I have learned, isn’t always an easy thing to make happen.
One of the most frequent problems I encounter as a college-level writing instructor is when a student is completely devoid of inspiration. They come to me, eyes downward, fingernails chewed and say, “I just can’t think of anything to write about.” Sometimes students like these are just timid. They’ve had a moment of inspiration and they have ideas, but they’re unsure of themselves. But at other times they are honestly stumped. Their inspiration is hiding somewhere in the recesses of their brains, snoring lazily, so badly neglected that it doesn't even know a wake-up call when it hears one off in the distance.
I often ask myself, what has put their inspiration into such a deep sleep? What could have happened in these students’ academic lives to weaken their inspiration to the point where it can barely stand?
I’ve arrived at the belief that it’s the result of many things, from seemingly minor details like the color of the walls of their classrooms, to major elements like the structure of the public education system itself. But the main cause of withering inspiration in these students is simply the lack of examples around them. Inspiration is starved on nearly every level of the education system in America. New ideas can’t germinate if they can’t even break into the soil, and the public education system continues to deposit layer after layer of impenetrable, infertile rock onto the ground. Not paying teachers enough or providing them with adequate support or materials contributes to this buildup.
Inspiration can also flourish only if a student learns and accepts that they have it in the first place. My hope is that if students who are starved of inspiration spend more time in classes where things aren’t always by the book, where there’s creativity whacking people over the head from all sides, their own inspiration will bulk up and start to contribute to the whacking too. We need more schools that laugh in the face of national unfunded mandates, more places where teachers are allowed to share inspired moments so that they can enable students to cultivate their own. We need schools created with inspiration in mind, classrooms built with it, teachers teaching lessons that were the result of it. Because simply put, inspiration is the one thing the public education system in this country lacks on every level. The No Child Left Behind act is not inspirational because it stunts creativity and originality. Many teachers see NCLB for what it is and continue to teach inspirationally, despite blows from on high, because they know how important it is to fight the good fight. Other teachers have even been resourceful enough to find compromise and teach inspirationally to a standardized test.
Inspiration happens when minds are open, when people allow themselves to let go of boundaries and move away from the status quo. And that’s what needs to happen on every level of the educational system. Inspiration needs to be allowed to grow and the only way it can is if we allow ourselves to look at education from a different perspective.
So let’s begin by stepping outside of the lines, in the smallest ways you can. Change the physical space itself, and the mental space will follow. Paint classrooms purple. Leave the doors open, let in some light. Turn desks upside down, sit on the floor, go outside. Read books backwards. Turn off the lights, listen to music. Run around the room. Think of other possible places for classrooms, re-imagine what we mean by “school,” and by “learning.” Read cereal boxes instead of books, use a controversial YouTube video to introduce discussion. The point is to break beyond whatever has stifled your inspiration so that a small amount of sunlight creeps in. The simple act of figuring out ways to break routines and boundaries is an inspiration in itself and eventually, hopefully, it will trickle down into the soil and nourish stronger and livelier new shoots of inspiration in students.
