Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Some Write to Remember...and Some Write to Forget

The line between what we remember and what we imagine to have happened in the past is a fine one. That line skinnifies with age. Thus, every skilled nursing facility and assisted living facility I stayed in six+ years ago had a "memory care" section.

Most of the time, the door to that area was locked. When someone needed admittance, they knocked loudly and an attendant came. I watched patients get wheeled in and heard the sound of the door locking behind them.

It's just random selection, I'm sure, but I never saw anyone come back out.

***

To work as a teacher requires a fundamental assumption: That you have something of value to impart.

People go through a complex curriculum of subjects before they get certified as teachers; I'm curious whether addressing this assumption is on the agenda at any of the institutions that offer those certifications.

There is always that blank space on any form you have to fill out about yourself that asks about your profession. Teachers can say "educator." Others may say "retired librarian." I always write "journalist."

But when I think carefully about the past half-century+, almost as much of my energy went into teaching as it did into journalism. All of it was uncertified.

It started when I was 22 in the Peace Corps, teaching Afghan students English. It started up again when I was in my 30s. Having published a bunch of stuff I was asked to teach journalism, first at U-C, Berkeley, later at Stanford and San Francisco State.

Those were the formal teaching jobs I had, but there were many others along the way. My students ranged in age from 7 to 95. The younger ones were second-graders whose teachers asked me to visit and discuss the global environmental issues that concerned me as a journalist.

The first time I remember doing that was in 1983, when I was 36.

Later, I taught through U-C Extension. Those classes were at night and the students were noticeably less privileged than my students enrolled in the U-C and Stanford graduate school classes.

Still later, I was asked to teach memoir-writing to senior citizens through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at S.F. State and U-C. It needs to be noted that I have not to this date ever published a memoir, though I have published articles that probably fall into that category of writing.

Most of the students were older than I was at the time, which was challenging. Since the goal was to encourage them to write stories based on their lives, I knew they would have to confront that basic assumption: That they had something of value to impart to others.

My technique was to start each class by asking for volunteers who would be willing to talk about their lives. As they did this, invariably and universally in my experience, the other students gave them positive feedback.

This, in turn, seemed to motivate them to take the next step -- to actually begin the process of writing it all down. A little bit each day will do. Five hundred words a day will yield 182,500 words over a year's time.

That's plenty enough for a memoir.

One of the more intriguing teaching experiences I had was to sit at a table with the third-grade boys at my children's school who were having "trouble with math. Often this meant they would disrupt the other students by acting out. They seemed to have trouble sitting still and concentrating.

There were only a few such boys, four or five per class, and the teachers had me sit with them at a table in the rear of the classroom, while they conducted math class for the rest of the students. When I asked the teachers what I should do, the answer always was "I'm not sure. Just try to keep them quiet."

The only idea I could come up with was to start a chain story-telling circle. Typically, I would start the story ("Once in a place far from here, a group of boys...") and then ask each student to add a line. They embraced this approach enthusiastically. and most importantly, from a discipline perspective, they stayed quiet and listened to one another.

Over time, I tried to work the math concepts the teacher was conveying to the other students into our story circles. Ever meet a rhombus chased by pirates? I have.

When my youngest son was in the third grade, he pulled his chair over to our table. He didn’t need extra help in math, so I glanced at his teacher; she gave me a nod back that it was okay.

I always visited the school for this purpose on Thursday mornings. Now, with my son on the team, the story circles were getting better. He is, and was then, a gentle, sensitive person, cerebral but empathic and funny in a self-deprecating way. 

After completing my math counseling on those Thursdays 15 years ago, I would get in my car and head south to Palo Alto and my writing classes at Stanford. There, nobody had trouble sitting still or concentrating. Nobody disrupted the class, nobody had trouble learning. Nobody had trouble participating and nobody had trouble writing stories.

Over time, in this group we dug into some of the deeper motivations behind the urge to tell stories. 

And that led me to the title of this essay.

HEADLINES:

TODAY’s LYRIC:

“Hotel California” by the Eagles

How they danced in the courtyard
Sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember
Some dance to forget

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