I HAVE BEEN DOWN on the Mississippi coast for six weeks helping out with six grandchildren who live down there.
My two oldest granddaughters are deeply involved with a wonderful dance studio run by one of the best teachers I have ever watched work in any field. Her name is Donna Burke. She danced professionally and led a dance troupe that danced in Las Vegas thirty years ago. She was trained in classical ballet and teaches it the old-fashioned way.
I discovered Donna ten years ago and flew down to the coast and enrolled my granddaughters in her school. Then I bought a condominium in the town where they live so I could be there to drive them to their classes. They longed to dance and I longed to help them do it. I had only sons. The chance to help my granddaughters learn to dance was too seductive to miss.
My mother had enrolled me in dance classes several times but I didn’t have the right personality to put up with the discipline. Neither do my granddaughters really but, luckily, Donna’s School of Visual and Performing Arts is the main game in the small town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Most of the girls who get elected cheerleader or win the beauty contests or are on the homecoming court are Donna’s students. It’s a leg up in a tough, competitive world and my granddaughters knew it. Peer pressure was on my side and so for ten years I have had the pleasure and pain of watching Donna work on my hardheaded progeny.
Donna takes no prisoners. She accepts no excuses. Being late to class or improperly dressed or missing a rehearsal is not an option. Praise is rare and hard-earned. Hard work earns you more hard work and higher expectations. The result is that her studio has won DANCEAMERICA national competitions three times and so many other trophies that the wall of shelves will not hold them all. They are piled on top of one another and covered with dust. There is no time for dusting trophies at Donna’s studio. Past accomplishments are nothing. The coming recital or competition is all. This seems very Zen to me. I can sit on the floor and watch Donna conduct rehearsals for hours.
I know genius when I see it and I am thrilled to have been able to give my granddaughters a taste of it.
This year, after ten years of work, they are on Donna’s competition team and rehearsing for their first competition in April. Besides the three regular two-hour classes they take after school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, they have extra rehearsals on Saturday mornings and sometimes on Sunday afternoons.
The results are high school dance teams that look like professional dancers. It is amazing what Donna and her helpers have done with small groups of girls on the Mississippi coast. If you ever wonder “why all those writers come from Mississippi,” just go and watch Donna’s dancers getting ready for a competition or a recital.
What does all this have to do with my teaching creative writing? Well, this fall my students are going to profit from the hours I have spent watching Miss Donna rehearse the competition team. I have been too easy on my students these first two years of my apprenticeship. I have let them get away with sloppy manuscripts and delays and all sorts of things I would never put up with in my own work.
My students have come to me to learn to become published writers. “What you do in practice you will do in performance,” I have heard Donna say a thousand times. The same is true in writing.
“I want that revision tomorrow,” I’m going to start telling my students. “I didn’t spend my time editing that story to have you sit on it for weeks. Go home and fix it now.”
This fall I am going to feel the spirit of Donna Burke’s consummate professionalism in me as I teach.
I’m going to remember her courage and backbone and unrelenting drive to excellence and demand from my students what she demands from hers.
Many of her students quit. Each year I have to drive my youngest granddaughter back into her classes and I don’t mean in my automobile. “Just one more year,” I tell her. “Just until Christmas. Just until you make the competition team. Just until you get your toe shoes. You don’t have to, of course, but how can you quit now?”
The thing I need to learn from Donna is that I am the teacher. I’m not there to get the students to like me or think I’m nice. I’m there to show them what it takes to succeed.
In a university that means you have to put up with them complaining to the head of the department or the dean and writing nasty things about you on the student evaluations at the end of the semester.
I don’t know if I’m brave enough for this job but I’m going to pretend to be. Hold me to this if you are around next semester at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.