Learning Annex

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“I began to teach poetry five years ago because I love poems. I do not do this in an elementary reading class, or a high school English class, or a college lit course; I teach poetry to ABE students at the community college. ABE is Adult Basic Education. My objective, as an ABE reading teacher at the community college in Olney, Illinois, is to raise the basic reading skills of my students who are between 16 and 60 years of age, men and women who never finished high school and need to get their GEDs, men and women who want to go to college, people who have lost their jobs due to lay-offs, people whose entrance scores weren’t high enough to land them in college-level courses.”

by Dan Manchester

“In every introductory creative writing class I have ever taught—elementary school, high school, undergraduate, summer programs, community arts classes, all of them—there has come a moment in the early days of the course where some class member surreptitiously approached me and confided in a whisper that reading and writing literature scares a new hole into his belt...”

by Heather M. Madden

“In a lecture on Zen Buddhism, Shunryu Suzuki explained, “In beginner’s mind we have many possibilities, but in expert mind there is not much possibility.”¹ As a writer, I am pleased by this notion; it seems true that every time I sit down to write, I am thumping across the field (sometimes battlefield) of the imagination’s possibilities, where I’ll encounter—in some order—both the oh! of wonder and the oh! of frustration.² Each time I sit down to write, I am learning to write.”