Tim Cummings talks about former students who formed a writing group that still meets monthly, years after his class ended. He calls it the most rewarding part of teaching, proof he actually made a difference.
What's the most rewarding part of teaching? The most rewarding part of teaching is okay, I'll give you an example. Several students end up finding you on social media and following you. Recently my book won a few awards so I was posting about it and one of the students chimed in and said oh congratulations, this is so great. I'm going to tell the group. And I was like the group. And then she wrote and said after the class ended we decided to keep going and stay together as a writing group and we share pages every month and all we do is talk about you. Oh what would Tim say about this? Or I know Tim would say this about this. How's Tim doing? And so the fact that they wow, that's beautiful. They created a community around it and taking some of the things I was trying to impart to them with them and that made me feel really, really good. I made a differ.
