Posted By BillHeise on June 19, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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I had put away my academic ambitions entirely devoted myself to building a business. I did this because academia was very difficult for me. Academics shared a dark sense of the world, and they thought that this was the only “legitimate” way to look at the world. I disagreed with them then, as I disagree now.

One of my friends had a poster on her wall of a particularly dark German expressionist painting, which I hated. It seemed to me to be the sort of dark expression that I was trying to redeem art from; but I could accept differences of opinion on matters of taste. But differences of opinion were only allowed in a classroom setting, where errant students could be corrected under the wise discipline of their betters. I was not on board with the “teacher point of view.” Therefore I was one of “them,” a lower student who needed to be raised up the the higher level.

This was made abundantly clear to me in a class in how to teach writing. In that class the star student at the University of Illinois declared without any sense of irony that “People are shit. There nothing but shit. And the sooner you [meaning me] realized that, the better off you will be.” I didn’t agree, which made me “shit.”

I felt besieged in graduate school by people who capitulated to a dark, and I felt wrong, sense of the world. I went into business, not because I was greedy, which was what every one of my academic colleagues thought, but because I wanted freedom: freedom to work for myself, freedom to create my own destiny, freedom to be a leader.  This quest for freedom is what had drawn me to academic life in the first place. I had been raised in the existential autodidactic tradition. I had found that freedom in academia came with strings attached.

But I found that although I had freedom to write my own syllabus and direct my own class, I was constantly under suspicion that I was not one of “us.” I was subject to very stringent, but loosely enforced, standards. My superiors simply expected that their notion of how things should be taught was so obvious as to be self-evident, and therefore anyone who did not agree with them must have something wrong with their mind.

I never agreed with the way my teachers were approaching the subject of how to approach English or how to approach teaching. Their “loose” methods involved not teaching anything at all. Rather, they wanted to draw people back to their “natural” minds, which had been corrupted by their trafficking in the world, of their greed for the lower appetites for “things” like money. Academics were pure. They didn’t act out of greed. They acted on a higher sense of purpose. This made them feel that in a perfect world that they should be in charge. Alas, they told themselves, the world is not perfect. At least they could withdraw to the Ivory Tower and maintain their higher purpose unopposed by lower, greedy men who did not even know what they did not know.

I didn’t agree with them. I didn’t think money was all that bad. In fact, I suspected that the reason that money was so distrusted in academia was that academics were devoted to an idealist tradition. Idealism divided the world between the lower appetite and “higher” ideals. The problem is I saw was not with money at all. The problem was with the idealist tradition.

I managed to get through graduate school by simply ignoring the dictates of my superiors as often as I could. When I would get called into the office to get yelled at, I would simply bow my head in submission and admit to whatever charge leveled at me. I would promise never to do it again–and I wouldn’t do it again–and would moreover offer to meet with them to check up on my “progress.” But they never really cared to meet with me of check on my “progress.” They were more concerned that I was not on board with “the program.” When I admitted that they were right, my problems went away. I continued to teach the way I thought was best for my students.

But if that freedom was elusive in academia, then I was not really free to create my own destiny or to be a leader. Leadership in academia came at the expense of what I thought to leadership was. Leadership was standing at the top of the hierarchy and directing your subordinates in ways that made them productive members of the community.

I had learned this by being an Eagle Scout. This was so antithetical to the experience of my fellow scholars that they actually broke out laughing when I told them that I had actually been an Eagle Scout. When they realized that I wasn’t joking, my fellow students fell into an uncomfortable silence that lasted for the next six years.

So after graduate school I decided that I career as an academic was not for me. I got a temp job as a secretary, because the only marketable skill that I gained during my eight years graduate school was my ability to type 60 words a minute. And I found out that in the private sector people were allowed great freedom to form their own businesses without a hierarchy of scholars hovering over them making sure that they were cooperating with the larger idealist program, which my experience with Jung, Campbell, and Joyce had convinced me was a flawed model.

I set my goals ofworking for myself, and in only 4 years I had achieved that goal. I started a company in which I hired out my services as a SQL programmer. I was quite happy working for myself. I would still be doing it except for the fact that I had a stroke in August of 2004. I could no longer work for myself, but I had not lost my entrepreneurial drive. So, after I got my mind back–a long process that took me three years–I started to think about completing a project that I had had in the back of my mind since I first started in graduate school: I wanted to write a book about how I wrote.

I had always taken notes, since I was basically inventing my writing courses in opposition to my teachers, who deployed the “I-want-to-know-what-you-think” method of teaching. I always needed more structure. I’d always written with an outline, for instance; and I thought some of my students could use more structure than an invitation to “free up the mind” in preparation for the “natural” disposition which was unclouded by appetite. I always thought that I would one day write a book, although until I had a stroke I had no definite plans to finish this project.

After I had my stroke and was rehabilitated, I went back to work seriously for the first time as a writer. And one of my projects was a book on writing, which I named Writing for People Who Hate Writing. It took me three years after I began working seriously on it to finish this book.

I was aided by a survey I gave once in class ten years earlier. I had been given the opportunity to teach three or four years the class in computers that a local technical college on account of the fact that I had an MCSE (a Microsoft certification). When the department changed its standards and teachers had to have Master’s degrees in their field, I was let go. But since I had a PhD in English, asked them whether teach English; and they said yes.

Over the course of several years, I can use this to my students were willing to study in my class, not because they like me or the class necessarily, but because it was a “money class.” Students knew that if they did not get a good grade in this class but they would not get a job and, being at a technical college, this was all that mattered.

On the first day of teaching English, I realized that I had forgotten what it meant to teach a “non-money” class. The same students who were so eager to study in my technical class had no interest in studying in my English class. And I thought this was a mistake. But the book that I was given in a class featured people who learn to love writing. This was an unbelievably unrealistic expectation given the students that I had been charged with teaching.

So I started thinking very seriously about human mind’s engagement with the world. I was unconstrained by academic experience. After all I was working at a technical college, and I believe that the administration didn’t really care what I was teaching my students anymore than my students cared. After a while, I went to teach at a local community college, whereupon the same level of student engagement with my writing classes. My students thought that writing wasn’t necessary and that the administration was simply extracting more money from them by lengthening their tour. I vehemently disagree with them on this, but I have long since given up trying to convince them of this.

My book (which should be available for sale around July 15, said the shill) is a result of my efforts at figuring out how get out of the idealist paradigm of teaching. It starts out talking about the mind in relationship to the world and that out that the world is larger than you and more complex than my readers think. However, intellectual growth comes from expanding your mind beyond its narrow confines to engage the larger world. The book is my attempt to give my students tools to engage the world as rapidly, and with as little pain, as possible.

Unlike my fellow student in academia, I don’t believe my students are stupid. I think my students believe that it is desirable engage the world. I think many of my students want to learn how to write had well-meaning teachers stand in their way rather than help them come to terms with what is required to write.

The posture that I taken the book is that too much of what passes for teaching in writing classes is nothing more than exercises that work for their teachers, who love writing, but is felt to be make work by students who don’t “get” writing as something that comes “naturally.” I think of each chapter on topics such as topics sentences, paragraphing, and brainstorming as shortcuts for people who hate writing, and always have and always will. They help them get through the task in spite of their hatred of writing.

There will always be a contingent of students who are uncomfortable with writing, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot learn to do it well. It seems to me that making the love of writing an a priori condition to do it well is nonsense.

The background that I’ve given in my 15 Memorable Books is how I got this position where I felt that I needed to write this book. For me, this book is the product of 20 years in the classroom trying to figure out what had worked for me. I was always far too practical-minded to believe in academic idealism and far too sympathetic to my students to dismiss them as “shit and nothing but shit.”

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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