Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy revolves around two primary concepts. The first is developing a positive, adaptive, learning environment in which students feel comfortable expressing their own ideas without a fear of reprisal. The second concept is developing a writing process that fosters continual growth as a writer of any genre.

I think part of creating a learning atmosphere is a proper relationship between the students and the teacher. As a teacher I would expect students to treat me with respect. In order to earn their respect I will need to respect them and present myself, including in how I dress, as someone who has a certain level of authority. Along with a good student/teacher relationship comes trust. As a teacher I would trust my students to have prepared for class, to avoid intentional plagiarism, and to respect each other. The students should trust that I will be engaged in their learning process, that I am prepared for class, and that I am willing to change things up when needed. My views on both good and bad student interaction can be seen in my classroom observations.

One way to keep learning a positive experience is develop activities that engage students in materials that feel relevant to them. Creating assignment that allow students to explore their own interests will let them know that, as a teacher, I am interested in helping them develop not only as a writer but as an individual. An example assignment can be seen here.

A facilitative method of grading is another way for students to feel comfortable in a classroom setting. By helping students to find their way to ideas or revisions instead of directing their creative efforts like dog being walked by its master will help them be able to make those decisions outside of the classroom. In certain situations a more directive method can be helpful. When teaching a student the difference between a classical argument and an analysis a more directive model would be more efficient. You can see how I combine both a facilitative and a directive method of grading here.

Developing a personal writing process is critical to becoming a better writer. Teaching students that writing is something that requires work and effort will a priority. Showing the students how important writing will be in their lives, whether they be English majors or math majors, will be both difficult and rewarding. Once a student realizes the freedom writing can give they will be more willing to get down and dirty in the writing process. I have developed a blog that is designed to present students with various writing processes and different steps in those processes. The blog is also meant to be a forum of sorts for questions about process and writing in general.

Dear Past, Thank You

I hear stories about how I loved to read as a small child, how I ate corn by the can full, and how much I resemble my father. I can see the resemblance of my face in his but I have to believe the other two through faith. My only memories of voluntarily reading before high school are centered on free pizzas from Pizza Hut, and don’t even get me started on the horrors of the flavor of corn. What I am trying to say here is that my love of reading and writing came at a great surprise to myself.

            In fourth grade I wrote a journal as if I were a pilgrim. I was a pilgrim those twenty minutes of class, six weeks that year and my teacher rewarded me for it. I didn’t receive a gold star or even one of those super sized pencils fully equipped with a watermelon eraser; she gave me praise and encouragement. It felt great knowing I was the only one in class to receive full points on every journal entry and I wish I could say it prompted me to write for the rest of my life. I have no memories of writing anything but spelling words or numbers until my senior year in high school.

            The culminating year of high school, the time you prepare for college, was spent writing poems that circulated among friends, pretending to learn web design and American politics. I would like to say from that time on I never stopped writing poetry but that again was not the case. Writing became something I had to do for classes I was not interested in. Community college helped me figure out that I had no idea who I was or where I was going.

            For reasons irrelevant to this reflection, I packed up my belongings and moved to York Nebraska to become an elementary teacher. This venture ended about as well as I react to eating corn. But it was my second year at York College that helped me find myself. I took a creative writing class by an adjunct professor named Jay Garrison. What I wrote in that class was both invigorating and terrible. It made me realize what it was I liked and maybe even loved to do. The work I produced in that class is what any life realization work should be, terrible. The quality of that work was not the important thing for me; it was finding direction that I could latch onto.

            I knew what I wanted to do and so the rest of the story is me doing it. After a brief stint at the University of Iowa I found myself tearing through every creative writing class I could take at Western Illinois University. I was also taking Literature classes where I experimented with analyzing and developing arguments about books and delving into the terrifying realm of theory. I had great teachers at Western but there was one in particular that helped me come to a more concise understanding of what I wanted and needed to do. Tama Baldwin guided me through a crash course on the grad school application process as well as fueled my desire to write. Now that I am at Tech I realize that it was not one person, especially myself, who made it possible for me to write this essay, it was a conglomerate of other people invested in what they loved.

What Came First The Teaching Or The Learning?

I think the answer to my question/title seems obvious, but when you think about it when does real learning actually happen for you? I do learn in the classroom setting when I am being taught too but for me the memorable moments of “Wow, I just learned something,” came when I was preparing to teaching something to somebody.

Most of my teaching experience comes from teaching people much younger than myself  (I am young by the way)…(right?) but some of my other teaching moments came in instances much like leading class discussion in 5060. Any time a person had to prepare to present a topic of sort they have a great opportunity for personal growth. I also think that just because a person is teaching that doesn’t automatically mean they are learning. It has to be a thoughtful process.

What Do I Need To Know? What Do “They” Need To Know? What Happens When Nobody Knows What The Hell Is Going On?

Anyone teaching 1301 needs to come to the classroom knowing that their students are not going to be excited about writing. The teacher should be able to write well and know the basics of how to transfer that ability. The teacher should be prepared to experience students who are anywhere on the writing spectrum. The teacher needs to have the desire to make the students excited about writing.

The students who are coming into 1301 should realize that writing is not something that is only done in the ivory tower at 2 in the morning, with three muses singing and whispering words into the author’s ear. They need to know that writing is a tool that will enable them to have confidence and power. Students should come into 1301 with some prior writing instruction and should expect to improve upon what they already know.

Plan B? If none of what I just talked about happens in the 1301 class room then somebody is in trouble, probably everybody. If the teacher isn’t prepared for diversity in comprehension, if the students do now put any effort into what they are learning, and if neither party is able to communicate then learning will not take place. A teacher should be able to adapt to the students needs and not the other way around. I do not know what plan B is at this moment in time but I will need to have at least a plan B through plan B 2.0.

Grading: What is it good for?

 

When I look at any assignment turned in for Engl 1301 I am primarily looking to make sure they have met the content guidelines. I look to see if they have attempted to follow the instructions and if they tried to give it a fair go. One thing that I keep finding over and over again is assignments that just fall short of the very basic steps of the assignment. The students will only do one or two steps out of a four or five step process. If I see an assignment that has failed to follow all the instructions I tend to grade that assignment harder. I would much rather see a student has at least attempted to follow through with the entire assignment.

 

I look to see if what they are writing about is appropriate for the given assignment. If they have written a decent response but are off topic then I try to redirect them. I tell them what they did well then focus on how they could use that skill to go in a better direction. I tend to give more open ended commentary but I do give more directive advice when I feel it is necessary. I do look for grammar but it is low on my radar and only address something if it comes up many times.

 

The Question That Keeps On Asking

The biggest concern I have for entering the classroom as an instructor is rooted my lack of confidence in my grammar abilities. How am I going to be able to teach my students the proper tools of writing when I am not entirely confident in my own ability to use them?

Let me tell you a sad little story about grammar. There was once a boy who went to school. This boy advanced through is school, moving from state to state, and one day realized that he was in college. This boy, after a trip or two into the darkness know as elementary education, decided to be an English major. He loved reading books, writing about books, and writing things he thought one day might be in his own book. He was coming to the end of his career as an undergraduate college student when he came to this sudden realization: I can be creative and analytical, I can speak and write in ways that are understandable, but I don’t know the technical reasons a comma goes where it goes.

This story may or may not but true but the lesson is one to be mindful of. Proper instruction of grammar and other writing tools is absolutely necessary.

What Suprised and Inspired Me About the Take 20 Video

When I think about myself as a future teacher I envision teaching Creative Writing. I knew I would have to teach composition when I came to Tech, that I would have to teach it after but I never thought that I might enjoy it. The video gave me a perspective on teaching composition that I hadnt gotten from anyone else, including people who teach it here at Tech. The teachers in the video said teaching composition was something they enjoyed, something they missed when they were not teaching it. This was the most surprising aspect of the video which in turn made it the most inspiring. If those teachers could enjoy teaching composition then so could I.

Taste, Place, and Process: How Writing Happens

For me the writing process begins in Columbia, sometimes Ethiopia. It starts with workers in a bean field, sweating, stretching out tight muscles, resting under a shade tree, harvesting coffee beans. From there the process time warps to the grocery store or the local coffee shop that sells my favorite beans. I take the beans home, send them through the grinder, pour the grounds into a filter, run hot water through, then viola, fresh hot writing-inducing coffee.

Finding a comfortable place to sit down with my cup of writing brew, a pen, and a notebook is the second step. No good writing can happen without creating a writing friendly atmosphere. Once the climate is right for writing the work can begin. I eliminate distractions, tell me friends to go away, be anti-social, and don’t stop writing until my pen runs out of ink or I run out of words.

I write in drafts. The first draft is a dumping of all thoughts and ideas. I need to get everything I can out on paper before I can really begin to know what I am going to write about. Doing this thought dump helps me process my ideas. The next step is to find out what works and get rid of the rest. I keep the writing that works, the writing that is going somewhere. I don’t keep it because it sounds pretty; I keep it because it says something meaningful. This process is organic. If I need a refill I stop writing and get a refill. This “break” is a good time to analyze how the writing is progressing. Once I have farmed out the good from the bad it is time to develop structure. I start building the piece, whether it is creative or academic, from the middle. I write the body then go back to introduce it.

The writing process is unique to the individual and I think it is important for every writer to find what works. If coffee helps you write, drink coffee. If taking your laptop to the toilet helps you write, do it.

Voice: The Final Frontier…Or Is It?

Does “voice” that resonates compete with or enhance “academic voice”?  How can we write successfully as “academics” and still have voice? Or, you can talk about how important you think voice is in teaching/grading:  how do you teach “voice”?  How do you assess it?

My first thought when I sat down to write this blog was to do a “po-mo” experiment by randomly taking passages out of everyone else’s blog and pasting them together. Instead I will just talk about the rhetorical effects that might have had. By taking others people’s words and pasting them together, a reader wouldn’t be able to pick up on my voice. They would be tearing their hair out trying to follow the line of thought. This could apply to teaching voice by showing students how important it is to develop a voice. It would also show students how easy it can be to pick up on plagiarism. When they come across a dramatic shift in voice they know the author has changed.  

Teaching writing happens in stages. How do you decide when to teach voice, is the last element or one of the first? Aside from learning how to put a sentence together, I believe voice should be developed in the very beginning stages of writing. It will help students become confident writers. When they are confident that they are going to be heard then they will be motivated to write in multi-faceted directions. 

Why do we teach First Year Writing? What should we be teaching in this course? Why?

First Year Writing gives students the ability to articulate thoughts, read and think critically, and to succeed in the rest of their academic pursuits. We teach students how to write in order that they might be able to find ways of expressing new ideas. We teach them to write as a means of communicating.

To do this we need to engage the students in reading. They need to read essays, novels, poetry. They need to read about writing and the need to write about reading. We need to teach them grammar and how to summarize. They need to learn how to see flaws in others writing as well as moments of brilliance. Students need to learn that writing is not something they only need to do in English class or even school.

These skills are important in all aspects of their academic career. Being able to write and comprehend what they read will be necessary in order to achieve their goals. These skills will travel with them in the “read world.” That place, we are all trying to avoid, is going to catch up with them and when they collide they will be prepared. They will be able to whip out there reading skills and debunk worn out ideals. They will slash through political dross with their pen and when the day is over, they will know what it all meant.