The Story Behind the 2 Rules of Writing

A lot has been going on at the website in the last few weeks. We took on an intern, Blossom Akpojisheri of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. We’re sorting things out with a photo editor, Allegra Boverman. And the website became financially self-sustaining. It’s a lot to celebrate all at once. Considering Erika and I founded this website after fleeing an untenable situation at another website, it feels good to be finding some stability and positivity among this community that we’ve managed to attract.

One of the things that comes with attracting students and fellow-travelers is that we’ve been looking at ways in which our old patterns are not useful to our new circumstances. For example: When we had something like 10 followers, I could just tell them the story of why the website is called 2 Rules of Writing. Now? I thought I had better make a record of it.

The Story Begins with Immigrant SAT Academies

The 2 Rules go back to when I was teaching for a company called LeapUp Learning, a bilingual English-Mandarin School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They hired me to run a fiction-writing boot-camp. A lot of bilingual schools, of the type that serve immigrant populations, are unfortunately very much open for business during the school-holidays: February Break, Spring Break, and even–no, especially–summer. Most of these school hold classes 6 or 9 hours a day during those precious breaks; and so for almost every daylight hour, these kids sit 25 to a room, practicing for the SATs, PSATs, SHSATs (which I call the ass-hats) or some other impending standardized test that will determine if they get into a good high school, college, etc.

Mind, I’m trying to describe what happens, not pass judgment on it. This is immigrant trauma, pure and simple. And, as a second- and third-generation immigrant myself, I’m shielded from such pressures by the fact that every member of the baby-boomer generation of my family became either a doctor, a lawyer, or a college professor. There’s maybe one nurse and one social worker; I guess every family has its black sheep. The economic pressures explain–but do not make up for–the fact that these children have their precious vacations devoted to staring at standardized tests in rooms that often don’t even have the natural light of a window to soften them.

The Story Continues with LeapUp and the Fiction Boot-Camp

It is to the credit of LeapUp (and perhaps to the credit of the fact that, with its Upper-East-Side location, it was able to service a wealthier and less anxious clientele) that they tried to do better by the kids in their care. Yes, the parents were going to send their children to us–to them, I mean–for hour after hour of schooling during the vacations. But the class they hired me to teach would at least encourage their imaginations. Cold comfort, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been that child, stuck in a classroom during vacation. I did the best I could, as did my employers.

But that was the situation. I had just left a few years of teaching summer SAT classes in these windowless rooms, and was now teaching a fiction class in a room with space and windows and a class-size half or smaller than what I’d been used to. Those cramped SAT courses had taken their toll on me; I came to recognize a certain angry, sullen look in the eyes of many of the students. It had made me feel sad to teach those kids. I brought that sadness with me into the new classroom, as I always do.

My Approach to Teaching

We’re building up to the moment where I wrote those fateful words on the white board. But before that, I should mention that my teaching style is desperately unsuited to the kind of teaching situation I often find myself in. Writers often use the dichotomy of “pantser versus plotter” when talking about writing–or sometimes the more genteel “gardener vs. architect.” I am more of a gardener than an architect.

Basically: I make plans and then I throw them out the second the student shows a need or inclination that goes beyond the scope of my lesson. One thing and one thing only guides my teaching: the needs of my students, moment to moment. When I teach, I try to stay in a state of attunement to my student: what is the issue they are raising? And what is the issue behind the issue? That kind of focus prevents me from adhering to plans, if not from making them.

All of which would be fine, but parents often want regular benchmarks and reproducible results and steady progress–things that are at best adjacent to, and at worse antithetical to, real teaching.

I’m not against planning. I am against sticking to old plans in the face of new data. Leaning into planning makes it difficult to lean into being flexible; to being open to suggestion; to being able to trust my students and allow them to direct the course of study according to their needs. I tend to think of it as having some combination of a poet’s sensibility and a technician’s sensibility with respect to teaching.

Why Teaching should be Fun, Engaging, and Empowering

The idea behind all of this is simple: How to learn and retain skills and information more efficiently? We learn best the things we enjoy. So the way to promote learning is to promote enjoyment. And the way to promote enjoyment is to promote a sense of ownership of your learning; to treat learning as play instead of work; and not to drive the student to exhaustion. Exhaustion is the death of learning.

And before you ask: doesn’t that make for a chaotic classroom? It did when I started. But since then I’ve had years of practice. 

So I had my first meeting with the owners of LeapUp regarding what they expected from the class I had to design. They made clear that the parents wanted some tangible result from the class. Fair enough. The parents already weren’t completely sold on the idea of a fiction-writing workshop.

The meeting was productive. My new bosses supported my work (they had hired me, after all).

What it Looks Like When Learning is Not Centered on the Student

I still felt echoes of a meeting I’d had with my previous employers. (In one such meeting, I had told them that there was a student who was taking one SAT drill after another and failing them because he needed remedial math classes. They clucked their tongues and gave sympathetic looks with their eyes, but ultimately said: “Well. If he keeps practicing it’ll do something.” Yes. It will teach him to be sullen and silent. It will teach him that the people in his life whose opinions matter to him; on whose opinion of him his young self esteem, indeed, his very personality will be formed and shaped for the rest of his life, think he’s not trying hard enough. When it’s they who are failing him and not the other way around.)

What it Looks Like When Learning is Centered on the Student

This was not one of those meetings for the simple reason that the new supervisors were up front about the stakes, and about our goals. They informed me in no uncertain terms that I would face the same odds; the same distrust; the same immigrant trauma. But they would be there to help me teach what I needed to teach and to smooth things over with the parents.

The First Day of Class

We settled on the idea of a tangible deliverable: that, in the five days the course would last, the students would each be responsible for writing a short story from beginning to end: conception, first draft, peer review, revision, editing, and finally publication. That last item would be my task: a booklet of all of the short stories written that term, tastefully arranged. The finished volume could even double as a recruiting device for future parents/grownups.

My head was full of all of this jumble as I entered my classroom for the first time. And my arms were full of my favorite books; the ones I’d used as reference materials for myself and my students in the past.

Breaking the Ice

There were perhaps seven students. We went through names and favorite whatevers to try to break the ice. But the ice was still there. So I put on my brightest tone of voice and said: “Raise your hand if you’re here because your parents are making you.” That was greeted with… dead silence. Did I misjudge? Miscalculate? Did I blow my chance before I even got to know these kids? Did I blow my chance of being invited back?

One hand went up. Then another. Then all of the hands. I pressed my point. “Okay. Since you have to be here, what is something you’d like to accomplish while you’re here?” And so on. From there it was smoother sailing.

But I still had to introduce the idea that they were to create, by the end of the week, a story that had never existed before. I had been thinking about the way in which I could boil down what I knew–from school. From the teachers and other mentor-figures I’d bonded with over the years. From the summer camp both Erika Grumet and I attended, which had been founded by a student of Maria Montessori herself. And from my own internal cogitations.

The 2 Rules Themselves

Perhaps more directly and more simply: how was I going to signal to these students, some of whom had been preparing for the SATs from age 10, that they needed to be okay with writing a really garbage first draft and then set about the vulnerable, introspective work of improving and repairing it?

I’d like to tell you that I came up with these lines in a fit of inspiration–a moment of poet’s rage, as Plato might call it. But no. I came up with them ahead of time and then went back and forth on whether it would work and whether I was leaving anything out until the moment I wrote on the board:

Class Rules:

1. You must make mistakes.
2. You must finish a story by the end of the week.

It’s funny to remember that, for me, that was the end of a long road of experience and introspection and false starts. And, too, it was the beginning of the long road to creating this website and this community and all that has gone with it. But for those kids, who didn’t see what happened backstage, it was just the first day of some class their parents were making them attend.