to every voice in the room. And to my delight, the more
I observed her teaching style and reflected on what made
it effective, the more I saw parallels to the principles that
guide good teaching practices at Saint David’s.
For one thing, Morag knew just how to draw our diverse
group in and engage us in work that often felt like play.
For the first exercise, we were out of our seats and moving
around the classroom, thinking about identity as it relates
to geography; then we sat and shared the stories behind
our names. I felt that surge of energy and curiosity that
comes with kinesthetic learning. And it made way for an
alert interest among all of the students, which helped us
lean into opportunities to share ourselves and our writing.
From there, Morag led classes that struck a terrific
balance between steady, reassuring structure and freedom
to experiment. She had planned each lesson around a core
question, and our class exercises followed a soon-familiar
routine of discussing models, freewriting in response to
intriguing prompts, and sharing our work aloud. From one
activity to the next, we all overcame our initial jitters much
sooner than we had expected to and became increasingly
hungry for more chances to hear one another’s voices
and to exercise our own. As Morag would wind down a
conversation about a James Joyce passage or an excerpt
from a Carol Shields novel, she’d ask, “Shall we do some
writing?” giving us a moment to shift into that creative
headspace where the unsettling-but-exhilarating process
of discovery occurs. And with more and more conviction,
we all said, “Yes.”
It takes courage to endeavor
anything that involves
trial and
Professor Morag Joss
error, and writing is no exception. But one of the best ways
to overcome the monstrously vague fear of “failing to
write well” is through repeated, incremental low-pressure
practice in recognizing and using the tools and techniques
that make for good writing. Along the way, we can learn
to “fail better,” in the words of Samuel Beckett, and we
can cast aside the notion of “writer’s block,” which Morag
Joss eschews as an “artificial way of externalizing one’s
own reluctance,” basically “a justification for not getting
on with the writing.”
The reality is that we are all full of stories, as Morag
points out, and what we come to learn is how to craft those
stories. And so our class loosened up and opened up and
considered the core questions she posed: What are stories
made of? Whose story is it, what voices can I hear, and
what are the characters saying? What are writers like?
This year’s Grade Seven boys at Saint David’s are getting
more exposure than ever to the patterns and tools that
help us to answer those core questions. Through our new
short story unit in particular, we are examining one great
work of literature after another, noticing their defining
elements and adopting some of those techniques as we
generate our own creative and expository responses. By
reading writers from a range of backgrounds, including
Poe, Chopin, Saki, Twain, Hurston, Jackson, O’Connor,
and more, we find that storytellers can bring a distinctive
voice, style, and set of themes to their work, challenging
readers to see new perspectives and insights and to embrace
their own individual ways of viewing the world and writing
about it. At the same time, we can recognize recurring
structural elements—exposition, rising action, climax and
resolution—as well as increasingly familiar literary devices
at work. The repeated exposure to these patterns builds
a sense of security in facing the next set of unknowns,
whether a student is picking up a new story or his own pen
Words We Love exercise
Winter 2018 • 19