By Chris Fauske
School of Arts and Sciences

Charles Simic, who was my advisor when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire and who is the current Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, remarked in a “craft of poetry” class that “a cliché’s hope is to be readmitted to the language.” Or something like that. By necessity, I paraphrase. I was a lousy note-taker in college. Charlie, as we called him, was spot on. He always was. But much as I often have occasion to recall with sympathy this perhaps slightly misremembered insight, there is one cliché that not only should not be rehabilitated, it should be banished completely from the popular imagination. Practice makes perfect, the saying goes.

Except it does not.

Or, rather, it very seldom does.

Practice usually reinforces in the practitioner the mistakes that he or she is making in the first place. Practice is better understood as a way of identifying errors, of rooting them out, and of not doing the same thing again. This is the spirit of the near-cliché that foolishness consists of doing the same thing a second time and expecting a different result. All of which has a lot to do with the questions explored in this issue of ASpect.

Teaching is about practice, in all the meanings of that richly nuanced word. It is about trying to find a way to enable learning. And one immediate problem presents itself: What is learning? Is it the ability to repeat information? To reproduce patterns of behavior? To assimilate knowledge and produce something distinctive and, ideally, unique as an outcome of that assimilation? And, if the last of these options, how is the value of the distinctive product to be judged?

I believe it was Charlie who told us once that when you start writing poetry you have to read and read and read, and while you are doing so you will be writing poetry that by necessity is derivative. You will find yourself writing that the “green grass” ripples or waves or stirs in the wind, and you will sound like Walt Whitman. Part of the art of learning is to recognize that you sound like Walt Whitman. If you continue to learn, you will then come to know that sounding like Walt Whitman is not good, nor is it bad, but it is initially inevitable, and you will resolve to keep learning, and then, one day-if you are really a poet-you will write about the “green grass” and you will sound like, well, like yourself. Charlie’s point was that if you write about the “green grass” and never sound like you, then, whatever else you may be, you are not a poet. Teaching is not about what you can do as a practitioner in a particular discipline, although it may be informed by that. It is about how to impart the understanding that knowledge is not about repeating information but requires mastery of information, including an appreciation of what information you have but do not need and what information you need but do not have. And it is about ensuring that learners take responsibility for that mastery. The hardest part of teaching is that there is no right way to do it. Students are not identikit individuals-who would want them to be?-so what worked today will not work tomorrow and would not have worked yesterday. So, teaching is also practice in the sense that it will never be perfect. It is about trying an approach and refining it if it works, which means understanding why it worked and how it might work better. It is about acknowledging failure and revisiting first principles. It is about never being satisfied. It is about articulating expectations and expecting more than you articulate. Ultimately, it is about risking failure to achieve success.

This article is part of ASpect’s May 2008 issue, Values in the Classrooom.