work in progress: the teaching of memoir

Maybe it doesn't sound all
that Ivy League or resume building to ask your students to honor the smear of
childhood or to heed the rhythms of remembered talk.   The negotiation
of once with the language of right now is unquantifiable. 
It's also a tad shy of rigorous to conduct a classroom full of
eased-back kids—dreamers and window watchers, scribblers and flippers of pens,
dismantlers of paper clips. 
There's no science to teaching creative nonfiction, and there are no
rules, and if one or two of the students emerge from the reminiscing haze with
a sentence that feels new, don't bet that they all enjoyed the ride.