I'm happy to go back to school. It gives me an excuse to buy shoes. I know. I'm 43. My school shoes these days are, mostly, sensible. But, as anyone in my family will tell you, I never left school.

"You can't hide out forever," my aunt says. "Someday, you'll have to get a real job." I spent 20 years as a student. Now I'm a college professor. I teach writing. I write too, of course, but I'm not Stephen King, so I can't quit my day job.

And most days, I wouldn't want to. I choose to teach, am lucky to teach, although I have other skills. I'm an excellent typist. I can work a bingo machine. And I was a flight attendant, which means I know CPR and verbal judo.

Still, teaching writing is funny business. And because I teach what I love, it's personal. "Can you tell me what that has to do with anything?" This is my friend Cathy talking.

The other day, Cathy told me about her first college writing course. The instructor, a big redhead, wore elbow-length gloves and purple combat boots. She was supposed to teach comma rules, but one day she brought in a shoebox full of Barbies and encouraged everyone to play. "You'll note," she said, "there's no Ken. My Barbies are independent women. My Barbies have each other." Her Barbies also had an elaborate wardrobe. Ken was absent. His flak jackets were not.

"Seriously," Cathy said. "What does that have to do with writing? What does it have to do with real life?"

I'd known Cathy's writing teacher. We'd gone to grad school together. "Find new ways to stimulate thinking," our teaching-seminar professor said. "Make connections between the classroom and the world." Cathy's instructor was into feminist theory. She probably wanted her students to think about gender roles. She wore designer lipstick, and spent a lot of time in thrift shops, putting together a wardrobe that was half lunatic bride, half professional wrestler.

"I don't know," I told Cathy. "We were all pretty confused back then." We were, mostly, a mess -- young writers trying to teach what we loved and why it mattered. We wanted to be convincing. One day, a friend from Cleveland showed up with a tweed blazer and a British accent. Another one collected Elizabethan puppets and used them to act out the death scene in Romeo and Juliet. Most of us took the Beat route. We wore black and sulked.

"It would help," my mother said, "if you all weren't so flaky." These days, I'm slightly less flaky, but I still haven't figured everything out. A few years back, I gave an assignment. I had my students write their own obituaries. Morbid, sure, but it seemed practical. A lot of my students get jobs at newspapers, usually the obit desk.

"How am I supposed to know how I'm going to die," one student said, "if I'm not dead yet?" "Make it up," I said. "Get eaten by a shark. Go sledding on Everest. Whatever." "I thought this was journalism," he said, and rolled his eyes. "We're not supposed to make things up."

"Are we going to use this in, you know, like, the real world?" a shy, sweat-shirted girl said. I wanted to tell her that little we did would prepare her for what she called the real world and I called life. "You'd be amazed," I said.

Back in college, the best class I took was Parapsychology 101. We had guest speakers: a telekinetic who bent a dorm key with his mind, then forgot to bend it back; a medium who chatted with one student's dead grandfather. Our professor, Dr. Z., had crystal balls and an Ouija board. His favorite saying was, "Open your mind to possibility."

That's what makes teaching worthwhile. Possibility. "A creative writing class," Richard Hugo once said, "may be the only place you can go where your life still matters." When I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who wrote or read books, or anyone who would think that was important.

"You'll hurt your eyes," my mother would say when she'd catch me reading. "You'll get ideas," my aunt would say, as if ideas were a disease.

Most of the culture in Trafford happened at The Polish Club. The club had one of those bowling games where you knock the pins over with a hockey puck. It had a bar that was open seven days a week, and bingo on Mondays and Wednesdays. On weekends, polka bands would come in from Pittsburgh, and people would get dressed up to hear them.

I started as a waitress there when I was 12, mostly in the bingo hall, but some nights, I'd work downstairs at the bar. The floor would shake from the weight of people dancing. Even the bartender would smack his hand on the bar and keep time.

Once, another man -- because he was happy or drunk or just took pity on me -- tipped me $10 after I spilled a whiskey sour in his lap. Ten dollars was a lot of money. Whiskey sours were what women in my family drank at weddings and funerals. "Don't worry, sweetheart," the man said as he shook cherries from his pant cuffs.

But worrying was what we did. The mills were shutting down. Every newspaper was writing the town's obituary. But when the doors of the Polish Hall opened and the bands kicked in, music gave everyone hope. Men would smile. Women in their high heels would lift off the ground.

At the beginning of every semester, I ask a question. "Why do you write?" I say.

I think this is a smart question.

One semester, a girl decked out in day-glow orange looked at me as if I'd been sculpted from belly lint. "What do you mean?" she said. "I mean," I said. "Why do you want to be a writing major? Why not engineering? Why disappoint your parents like this?" "Math makes me break out," she said. "Writing makes me happy." So there.

In the spirit of this back-to-school season, I'd like to apologize to my students for everything they've never learned. I'd like to tell Cathy her instructor didn't mean any harm. I'd like to say writing might be flaky business, but it's important the way all art is important. Because it makes us happy. It helps make sense of things. It allows us to be ourselves. It brings us hope. Which is a lot like a polka band that comes to town when people need it most.