Abstract

This paper describes my return to community college to get a hands-on education in music and art; the experience resulted in unanticipated improvements in my own teaching. Specifically, I learned the benefits of letting students have more access to each other’s written work—as in a ceramics class, where one cannot hide the pot one is working on, or a counterpoint class, where one of the regular activities involves students writing out their own fugues on the board for class discussion. I discovered that an analogousapproach in a course driven by reading and writing is an efficient way to address common writing problems, helps students take their writing more seriously, and results in an atmosphere that is at once earnest and playful.