By Jen Shin
When I applied for the WITS Apprenticeship last summer, I waded through the fears that I had held onto around teaching. Who was I to teach anyone on writing? Who was I to be listened to by a roomful of angsty teenagers? I didn’t explicitly hear these questions, but I felt them in my trepidation around teaching. Perhaps in the same way that, in my early stages of writing, I had not called myself a writer – or artist – but writer-adjacent.
Over the first half of the WITS Apprenticeship, the WITS Specialist, april joseph, taught me and my fellow apprentice Jeremy the fundamental principles of pedagogy, like the different styles of learning and how to structure a course outline, which solidified my own understanding of the ways in which I learn. This past spring, I shadowed JP Perrine at Franklin High School for two months, which was a chance for me to see a syllabus in action from start to finish and experience the classroom dynamics. The theme was field guide, which included an invitation to be outside as a means of shepherding the students to creating their own field guide.
What I didn’t expect from my time at Franklin was to be transported to the era of my youth, where field trips were the most anticipated event during the school day. A trip outdoors, perhaps on a bus, and always in a new environment, away from the pebbled-plastic chairs and wobbly metal desks. Outside, I became curious and excited – and adult Jen experienced the same feeling as young Jen. I listened to the students around me, some of them gabbing in groups about crows, some of them scribbling intently in their notebooks, some of them laying in a window of sun on the grass.
What struck me then was the liberty that WITS writers have in their lesson planning. As one WITS writer, Dey Rivers, said to me, the act of lesson planning is a creative one. Throughout this year, I’ve realized that what I thought I needed – all of the how-to’s on how to be an educator and an exhaustive list of do’s and don’ts – was not what I needed at all. Instead, this apprenticeship gave me the foundational elements I needed to crack open my own understanding of teaching as yet another form my creativity can take.
With that new understanding, I was able to take all that I learned from april and other WITS teachers and create my own lesson plan. I chose to share an excerpt from Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, where she uses the memory palace technique as a form for one of her chapters. As I created the slides, the handout, and the lesson plan, I felt the nagging return with a dose of perfectionism and self-criticism. I smiled to her and acknowledged her existence, all while leaning into the limitless directions that my creativity could go.
Jen Shin is a Korean American writer and mental health advocate with over a decade in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. Her writing focuses on her addiction, exploring the impacts of identity, race, and intergenerational trauma. Through her work, Jen hopes to reach communities of color to destigmatize the stigmatized, decolonize shame, and encourage healing. She is the recipient of HerStry’s 2022 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and is an Anaphora Arts Fellow. In 2021, she published Have You Received Previous Psychotherapy or Counseling? through zines + things and her essays can be found in Oregon Humanities, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
