Anne Ruggles Gere
Professor, University of Michigan
Scenes from a Life
Scene 1: I am sitting with my chin on the window sill feeling sorry for myself because I'm too young for school and my mother says we can't go to the park. Then I get an idea. Every Sunday afternoon I watch my mother write a letter to her father in St. Louis; I will write a letter...to Santa Claus. I ask my mother for a pen and some paper and begin "Deer Santa Klaus." Actually my letter is more like a list--the blue dress, the patent leather shoes, the doll. Years later when I read Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings I am struck by the aesthetics of her early experiences with language. My first composing teaches me--because the dress, the shoes and the doll all arrived--that writing makes things happen
Scene 2: It's the second semester of my sophomore year in college, and I have walked around Miller Library three times. I know I should go tell Professor Chapman what my major will be, but I still can't decide. When I came to college I said I would major in biology, but I hate the smell of fetal pigs, and every time Professor Scott shows charts of the Krebs Acid Cycle, my eyes glaze over. What I like is English, but that seems so, well, like fun. My Ethan Frome- style New England background tells me that I shouldn't enjoy my studies too much. But it's spring, and I have to tell Professor Chapman something. I choose fun.
Scene 3: I am the youngest teacher in the English Department at Princeton High School, I wear the shortest skirts, and I seem to ask the most questions. "Why don't we meet together to talk about the way we grade papers instead of always doing it by ourselves?" "How do you know that students are learning anything from reading The Scarlet Letter?" "What are we supposed to do about teaching writing anyway? I never took a writing class, not even in college." Three years later, my patient colleagues are no doubt delighted when I announce that I have found a new place to ask my questions: I'm going to graduate school.
Scene 4: I came to the University of Washington to teach teachers, but it's 1975, and very few people are enrolling in English education. One day I hear about something called the Bay Area Writing Project, and I remember all my questions--I still have them, even after graduate school. Maybe a group of us could get together to work on some answers. A year later we have the Puget Sound Writing Program in motion, and for the first time I begin to learn something about teaching writing. I start reading more poetry. The ghost of Theodore Roethke still looms here.
Scene 5: It's fall term, 1996, and for the first time in ages I am teaching first year students. We're doing a first-year seminar on American literature, and I can't believe how much I'm enjoying it. These Michiganders eye me suspiciously when I assign the Cliff's Notes version of uck Huc
Huck Finn (after they've read the real thing), I try to convince them that it's ok to laugh at Sherman Alexie's jokes in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and we all glow with pride when they turn in portfolios that are a pleasure to read--even during the frantic end-of-term craze.
Scene 6: I'm packing my books for Berkeley and wondering what the next few weeks will hold......
Email: argere@umich.edu
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