Be Like Huck

It'll happen when it happens.

One of my students, a fantastic writer, could not put a word down on paper.

He obviously had a head full of ideas that was driving him, if not insane, then at least to the point of a mild hysteria. And yet every time he would sit down to write he would freeze up. He couldn't get them out of his hand and down on the page.

It took a long time for me to work out that the key was just to give him the option of writing and walk away. He's fifteen years old, he will do it if he wants to. Although he is writing his coursework and I know that time is running out, I also know that yelling at him about deadlines won't help. Instead, I have found that I just need to suggest that some work might happen in the time available, and prepare the resources and a bit of encouragement.

"You can write, you just don't think you can write."

That sort of thing.

Today he wrote four pages in an hour and a half and said, "You know, the reason I can do this is because there's no pressure."

I agreed that there was, in fact, no pressure.

And then he carried on writing, before checking it carefully and handing it in.

There is, in fact, no pressure. What is the worst that can happen? Somebody in authority might not be happy with you? Boo Hoo. As Huck Finn said, "Sometimes I'd play hooky, and when I came back to school somebody would have a good holler at me, and I'd always feel much better."  Twain's Huck is capable, fearless and, most importantly of all, feels all the pressures of the adult world to be mildly amusing distractions from real life. Which is what they are.

We should aspire, teachers and students, to be like Huck. There is no pressure. If you want to write it, write it. If the class wants to be quiet, let them be. If they won't let you start the lesson, what will do more harm: screaming at them? Terrifying them? Piling on the pressure in all its "you will never amount to anything" intellectual shabbiness? Or waiting an extra five minutes? Sometimes in teaching, wrote Rousseau, you have to be ready to waste time to save time.

There's no pressure. Sometimes, we forget that.