As I walked around my writing class this morning, looking for students with questions, I saw more clearly that my relationship with them was not that of a peer, but rather that for these eight weeks of the teaching-relay I had the enormous responsibility of leading each one of these different people through to enjoying writing and being good at it.
It is a very great honor to be allowed to give new writers creative writing assignments, and to be allowed to read their writings. Some of them take my assignments and make them their own, showing me anew how little of me and how much of each student teaching is. Today, a student showed me a tender and beautiful essay about playing in the rain as a child. It is a beauty that I will treasure, and far more than I expected from my assignment of an autobiographical story.
