Email walt.mcdonald@ttu.edu
© Walt McDonald, 2006
Updated 8/30/06
As a pilot, when I applied to teach English at the Air Force Academy, what I wanted to do was read some of the best-used language in the world, some of the most moving, exciting words--and to share those pleasures with others.
For decades there and at Texas Tech, hundreds of the best people I've ever met let me hang around while they learned. I watched the eyes; I liked to see the sudden insights. I promised students they could encounter delight in discovery, in other people's writing and their own. As a teacher, I got to be there when it happened.
My mother and dad believed fiercely in the American dream. They moved to Lubbock a month after the founding of Texas Tech was announced. They believed higher education was the best way to make a dream real, that learning could give access to the world's great doors. Thanks to them, I've learned that college doesn't exhaust the desire to become; marvelously, it muscles the imagination.
Education denies the decay of joy--even though we all know that "nothing gold can stay," as Robert Frost wrote--that all things end, and that the journey isn't long. College years are in many ways among the best of all--allowing the mind to be involved in its own motions, encouraging splendid possibilities of heart and mind that no one can take away.
I went back gladly to stacks of papers, knowing I'd find in every batch some sudden insights, unexpectedly right ways of saying. I've seen students make amazing discoveries in words--those wonderful moments that validated my own commitment to other people's lives, through language. Simply, with continuing joy, I learned with a sense of wonder that I love and care for people more than words.
Flaubert said, "None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs or our thoughts or our sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." I believe every student yearns to say something to someone so moving, so musical, that it would melt the stars--or at least the heart of someone special.
As a teacher who writes, I felt lucky that for a little while, before
the golden bowl breaks, before the silver cord snaps, I got to hang around
words and see what happens--my students' words, and words that spin off
my own fingertips. I'm one of Texas Tech's luckiest alumni:
for a while, I got to walk that wide, handsome campus day by day and work
with the young ones coming on. What writer or teacher of writing
doesn't want to move us to tears or chills or hugs or laughter? Who
doesn't want to pass along a thrill like that?
"Reflection on the Art of Teaching" (revised), by Walt McDonald.
From Reflection: The 1999 Texas Tech University President's
Report,
Dr. Donald R. Haragan, President.
Used by permission.
Walt's teaching fields, and courses most often taught
Creative writing
- Beginning, advanced, and graduate workshops
- "Voices That Are Great Within Us"
- "The Modern American Comic Novel"
- "The Hero in the Modern World"
- "The Many Voices of America"
Links