Teaching English for years changes the way one hears a sentence. A teacher becomes alert not only to correctness but to hesitation: where a learner loses the thread, where grammar hides an idea, where a complicated explanation can be made precise without becoming thin.
That attention enters creative writing too. Fiction may resist the classroom, but it still depends on rhythm, sequence, implication and the exact pressure of a word. Teaching has made me less impressed by ornament for its own sake and more interested in whether language actually carries thought.