Here is novelist Christina Lynch at LitHub:
When I was hired for a tenure-track English professor position, a colleague said to me, “You’ll never write another word.” I was slightly offended, since I had at that point been writing professionally for almost thirty years. Teaching was a third career for me, after journalism and television writing, and one that seemed a good fit for a professional writer turning her hand to novels. Fridays off, summers off—what could go wrong?
I soon understood what he meant. Teaching composition and critical thinking to a hundred students each semester is an all-consuming endeavor. The student body at our rural California community college is an eclectic mix: in any given classroom, I had students still in high school getting college credit, veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan transitioning to civilian life, foster youth living on their own for the first time, parents of small children working a full time job, parents of small children working two full time jobs, second language learners, and full-time 4.0 students preparing to transfer to places like Berkeley and UCLA.
The first year was overwhelming as I struggled to support and prepare all of them to excel in academic writing, but more pointedly, to put themselves, their ideas, their hopes, their insights, into words on the page—with a properly formatted Works Cited page, of course. Each student was required by our course outline to produce 6,000 words in formal essays. That meant about four shorter writing assignments in and out of class each week to prepare them for those longer essays.
On average, and with no teaching assistant, I was reading about a million words of student writing each semester, much of which was far from coherent and required clear, helpful feedback to get there. Forget Fridays off—I was working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and still falling behind. And the stakes were so much higher than I had imagined; these students were not just names in a gradebook—they were people, most of them living below the poverty line, who desperately needed to know what I was teaching them.
But huge obstacles kept coming between us—their kids were sick, they got evicted, their parents got deported, they had to work a last-minute double shift, they had undiagnosed dyslexia/depression/bipolar disorder. I quickly realized they were not in any way less intelligent or less motivated than the people I went to school with at Harvard. They just had less money.
The careers they were aiming towards were things our community really needed: nurses, teachers, firefighters, farmers. If I could just help them get there, the world actually would be a better place. When choosing between another Sunday spent grading or spent writing, I started asking myself whether any piece of fiction I composed would really have the same impact as helping others find their voices and change their lives.
At that time, I was working on my third novel, which had dual protagonists and was set in Italy in 1956. It required careful research and total focus. As my first semester teaching full time built to a climactic Mt. Everest of ungraded essays, I had panicked conversations with a grad school pal, a veteran teacher and writer. He asked, “Are you spending more time grading their work than they spent writing it?” Yes. “Are you giving them more feedback than they can take in?” Yes. “Are you working on your novel?” No.
Read the rest here.