A richer semester ~ with Jean Miller~
Why I Teach Writing
People pursue careers for a variety of reasons. Often the reasons are the same as their reasons for choosing the career in the first place. I made the discovery some years ago that for me this is not the case. Here’s a disclaimer. I never aspired to be a teacher. I never gave lessons to my dolls. I have had two careers before this one. As an English major, I am not well read. I have, though, always had a knack for writing and sometimes a talent is support enough for a teaching career. But my initial reaction to the job as a TA in the mid 1970s was along the lines of you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming!
My tune changed during my years as a technical writer in the petroleum industry. It came to me as a revelation one day that I wanted to teach. It was that simple. After losing my corporate job to a recession, I went back to school at Purdue to teach myself how best and most happily to do so.
But I think I now know this isn’t at the heart of why I teach writing--over and over again. That goes deeper, to my roots. My parents’ education in Ireland was cut short, especially my mother’s. Having attained the highest level of schooling available on Achill Island at 14, she had to leave home to work as a servant in rich people’s homes in England. This she did for much of her teens, sending money home as was expected, until World War II brought with it an unexpected gift. Nurses were desperately needed, so even an uneducated girl from the West of Ireland could get into nursing school. My mother became a nurse. She then passed the course in midwifery.
My parents met and married in England and settled in Nelson, Lancashire, a cotton mill town where my sister and I were born. In the middle of our grade school years they decided to immigrate to the US to improve their daughters’ options. The only way for us girls to stay out of the mills was to pass the 11+ exam, and a pass was not assured. The States didn’t have such barriers and even a university education was available to your children if you scrimped. And they did.
My mother also got an experience of American education, taking night school American history required for the GED, which was a prerequisite to the state boards. She passed both and had a long career as an RN.
Through all of this my parents’ motto was that you could never have too much education. This alone would make a career as an educator compelling. But why teach writing? I believe this goes back a generation further. My mother had had a poor relationship with her own mother, so it didn’t seem unusual that they never corresponded. Irish families are like that. And, truth be told, my father didn’t correspond with my other grandparents either. I somehow hadn’t given this much thought till, well into my adult life, my mother revealed a secret.
“Didn’t you wonder why we never got any letters from your granny?” she asked. “She couldn’t read or write.”
It had been determined that my grandmother, the eldest of nine, would stay at home to raise her siblings. No school. No wonder! She had been denied something that should have been her right and there were repercussions. My granddad had spent his work life in England, as was the custom, and the only letters exchanged between my grandparents for many years were either written or read aloud by my mother.
This discovery has been an epiphany. I can’t help but see myself in a new family portrait framed by literacy. It seems to me that an arc has been completed in relatively quick succession, only two generations, from illiteracy to education to teaching. I have begun to see the teaching of writing as something that chose me. My reason for choosing to teach writing is separable from and pales in comparison to what may be my deepest, most essential motivation: my grandmother needs teaching.
Jean Miller
English Department
Washtenaw Community College