Teaching — MARK FARRINGTON

MY TEACHING LIFE

I got my first teaching job shortly after college, at a small, private Quaker school outside Philadelphia. I taught English to grades 9-12 and also served as Director of Dramatics. It was a great situation: classes of around fifteen students each, and although I had to teach some pre-existing courses (Shakespeare for 10th graders, a research project in 11th grade), I had freedom to decide how I taught those courses, and even more freedom to design other courses myself (for instance, I created a course in Theater of the Absurd, where the final project involved everyone in class performing a short scene from an absurdist play.) Most everything I knew about teaching came from having been a student for sixteen years, and about the biggest thing I learned about teaching was that if you’re going to meet a class of students five days a week for fifty minutes a day, you’re going to have to come up with lots of stuff for them to do. I also learned that I enjoyed teaching, although it was a lot of work, and most people seemed to think I was pretty good at it, despite my inexperience. But more than anything, I wanted to be a writer, and I did practically none of my own writing during the nearly two years I spent at that school.

It seemed to me that my choice was writing or teaching – “or,” not “and.” I resigned from my job, moved back to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts where I’d grown up, and spent the next five years picking up odd jobs (taxi driver, bookseller, security guard) and trying to teach myself to write. Along the way I got a one-year position as a “visiting writer” in the local schools, sponsored by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. I was sort of a “traveling minstrel for creative writing,” in that any teacher could invite me into their class to teach a lesson on creative writing. In the summer I traveled to some of the smaller towns to give writing workshops on Saturday mornings. One time only one student showed up – to be taught by me and my five teenage assistants – since part of the grant involved providing jobs for young people – and that one student happened to be six years old, so she told us her stories and we wrote them down.

Everything changed for me when I decided to enter an MFA program in fiction writing. I felt I’d taught myself everything I could about writing, but it wasn’t enough to get me where I aspired to be. I chose George Mason University in part because I thought it was near the ocean (it wasn’t). And while I got almost everything I’d hoped for in terms of my writing, I got even more from my teaching. I got a teaching assistantship right away and taught two sections of Freshman Composition my first semester. I also got to know several faculty who were associated with the National Writing Project. Their philosophy was opposite the way I’d been taught writing in school (with dictums like, “Never put a word down on paper until you know exactly what you want to say,” and “Outline everything in advance and then make sure you follow your outline exactly.”) but matched up beautifully with what I’d been learning about how “real writers” wrote (such as Flannery O’Connor’s statement that, essentially, she didn’t know what she had to say until she saw what she’d written down.”) And I had the freedom in my composition courses to teach writing the way I believed it should be taught: not as a bunch of rules that led to a kind of “fill-in-the-blanks” approach, but as a way to discover, express, and understand those things that mean the most to us.

“This was a remarkable change for me. Suddenly, I realized I could be both a writer and a teacher. Being a writer actually helped my teaching, and teaching helped my writing.”

It was in that period that I finally began to see myself as a writer and a teacher. When I was in college and people used to ask me what I wanted to be, I used to tell them, “Anything but a teacher.” I was thirty-five years old when I finished my MFA, and while I still didn’t want to be “only” a teacher, I knew I wanted my career to include teaching.

I stayed at George Mason for several years, teaching first as an adjunct and then in a full-time position as a visiting assistant professor. I also became more heavily involved in the Northern Virginia Writing Project, one of a couple hundred sites of the National Writing Project. Then in 1996, I applied for a job as director of a new MA in Writing Program that Johns Hopkins University was starting in Washington, D.C. I didn’t get that job (and have been thankful I didn’t ever since), but the person who was hired brought me on as an adjunct professor. I taught at both Mason and Hopkins for a few years, then was promoted to a part-time position as Fiction Advisor at JHU, and then, a few years later, moved into a full-time position as assistant director. I remained in that position for several years; then in 2016, when we were charged with helping JHU expand the programs it offered, I created the MA in Teaching Writing Program, an asynchronous program for current and future teachers who wished to use writing in a meaningful way in their teaching.

I built the program on some of the National Writing Project’s principles, most notably that teachers of writing should write themselves. As much as I had learned about teaching from books and other teachers, I’d also learned a lot from my own experience as a writer, and I found I could share many of the strategies I’d devised for myself while putting together my own writing process.

“In a sense, I created this program as a model for what I wished I’d had available to me when I first started teaching.”

I also found I enjoyed being the director of my own program. The position I’d applied for years ago as director of the new MA in Writing Program had, at the time, proved to be one that involved a lot of “schmoozing” of important people in the D.C. area, in order to build a program from scratch, and that’s the part I would have hated and been terrible doing, and the reason I ended up being grateful for not getting the job in the first place. The Teaching Writing Program existed on a much smaller scale, and it allowed me to focus on those things I believed to be most important about writing and teaching writing, and to hire some of the people I knew to be among the best teachers of writing.

The program was very successful in its first few years (at its height, we had more than 100 students enrolled, from all over the U.S. and around the world), but COVID and changes in both what teachers were being asked to do (including learning how to teach online) as well as changes in the political climate hit the program hard, and in 2023, Hopkins decided to end the program. I spent some time as director of the larger MA in Writing Program, while also working to ensure that students still in Teaching Writing could complete their degree. Then in December 2024 I officially retired from my full-time position at Johns Hopkins, although I’m still currently teaching a course or two a year as an adjunct.