What rational motives could be blamed for spending two weeks writing and considering the teaching of writing? You could write at home and possibly get more done. With a few e-mail queries you could probably find someone willing to read your writing and offer modest feedback. From Amazon you could order a decent book about teaching writing and mine it for a few good ideas. You could set your own goals for teaching in the fall and keep track of your progress in a moleskin notebook. You could even record the whole project for your professional development file to show how motivated you were.  Why not log the whole experience without the expense of structured time and program fees?

Because there is no free-lance summer like the Summer Institute. Although popular wisdom holds that writing and teaching are solo performances, it has not been so for more than 85,000 teachers, who have participated in summer institutes of the National Writing Project since 1974.  Teachers reflect on these summers as “transformative” and “inspirational,” while most of them persist in arguably the most demanding profession: teaching writing.  What comes of giving up precious leisure hours in the summer to write, teach, and think about teaching?

The first payoff come when a colleague responds to your tentative efforts to write with respect and even admiration.  In the Summer Institute teachers are proclaimed writers, and their writing receives the appreciation of high art.  Probably it is closer to “low art,” but no one ever got better at writing without an ally who could believe in what it might become.  And I remember the moment in the summer of 1986 when someone said she was touched by my writing, and it was someone who knew what good writing felt like.  I was not so diffident as a writer, but that affirmation made all the difference to me. And I realized that every student in my classes was hungering for a little taste of praise just like that.  I would not have learned that at home.

The next payoff comes halfway through the duration when someone starts to read about some buried hurt or frustration, and you witness healing between the lines. To be sure no one plans for this event. More likely we (especially the males) are all hoping the writing does not get too personal, and the discussion stays on the cognitive level.  But writing may sweep over rational boundaries. In 1998 I felt compelled to write a poem about the troubled home run king, Roger Maris, and in the middle of reading it out loud, began inexplicably to bawl.  Beyond the humiliation of crying about a baseball player long dead, I was also a co-leader of the Institute, and had demonstrated my fragility to colleagues I had only known for perhaps two weeks.  If I learned anything from it, it was that such outbursts should not be dreaded, but in fact welcomed for their palliative effect. I came, I cried, I survived.

Then comes the moment when you are asked to share a sample of your best teaching, so that the community may benefit from your experience. In the winter this moment could be your undoing, as colleagues find fault with your proposal or later murmur about your credibility as a teacher. Some school environments are poison to initiatives or any suggestion that the status quo is not acceptable.  And teachers are not always receptive to colleagues’ attempts to model or lead, because it apparently casts a shadow on their own teaching.

Not in the Summer Institute. Because community standards insist on constructive feedback about teaching in the same way feedback about writing is practiced. Certainly you do have to practice to get this kind of feedback right, but it is remarkable how much helpful insight can be communicated without attacking the presenter. You always feel safe in the hands of Writing Project teachers, because they have learned the most delicate ways to say how much attention your performance will need to make it ready for prime time.

Some years the Institute has run for four weeks, and some years for only two. In either case teachers insist they could have gone on for another week without complaint.  And as we are taking down the room, taking pictures, and finally gathering at a local restaurant to celebrate we are feeling the loss of friends and the daily luxury of writing, if only for a few weeks. Usually we reunite in the fall.

Everyone reads some piece or part of a piece of writing from the group’s anthology, and we savor the best moments in our own words. Another sell-out to sentimentality, but even the hard-edged among us participates in the joy of reading our lives in our best words.  The irrational wins the day.

If you stayed home, you’d get none of this.  It is hard to express what it means to our colleagues, who pity us for sacrificing our vacation to such labors. There is no rational explanation, though we struggle to explain it.  They must wonder what flaw in our recollection could make us believe it was all worthwhile, and, in fact, make us claim we would do it again.

And curiously we will do it again and again. We are writers, and there’s no accounting for what makes us happy.