Courses Taught

Background

Loyola University, Chicago, IL.  Master of Arts (English).  2000.

North Central College, Naperville, IL.  Bachelor of Arts (English-literature/European History).  1998.

Philosophy of Teaching:  To Interrogate, To Evaluate, To Synthesize

            Of all the questions I’ve had to ask and answer in preparation for writing this statement the most fundamental is “what is writing?”  Writing, at its very core, is a concrete way of expressing ideas through language.  Unlike speech, which is most often a spontaneous, fleeting act (those speeches which are not are usually written first), writing exists for longer than a moment.  It can be shaped.  It can grow.  Many times after a verbal argument, I sit and dwell on all the good points I could have made, on all the witty retorts I could have said.  But writing allows time for ideas to germinate and develop.  In that way, it’s less dependent on verbal acumen than speech.  Writing levels the playing field—tortoises no longer have to compete at a hare’s pace.  This way, the ideas that underlie the communication become most important.   No quick witted turn of phrase can cap an argument.  That idea must be able to stand up to extended scrutiny.  Writing is more than language.  It’s the ideas that language expresses.

            The primacy of ideas in writing has become my focus in teaching.  The most eloquent person in the world can falter without something to say; the most inarticulate can struggle to say something wonderful.  As education is more than a degree or piece of paper, so writing is more than what ends up on the paper.  It’s the whole host of thoughts and ideas that make up the language on that paper.  Teaching English is more than giving students a body of skills so that they can go out in the world and use proper MLA style, vary their structure of their sentences, and recite the seven rules for using a comma.  That’s not to say that those skills aren’t covered in my classes, but I believe they should be merely tools students can use to express ideas, not ends in themselves.

Every first day of class, there are always a few knee-shaking, terrified students, utterly mystified by writing.  Or there are a few who sit in the back and play with their pencil waiting for the minutes to tick past.  Both of these groups of students have one thing in common—they’re convinced they can’t write.  Writing mystifies them.  Their fear or their apathy is merely the result of this mystification.  Because they lacked the natural eloquence that comes to the select few, they’ve come to believe that English classes have no place for them.  It’s these students that can be aided by the idea-centered approach.  By getting these students to focus on what they have to say rather than how they are going to say it, I can help eliminate some of their fear and resistance.  Most everyone has something to say about something.

However, all ideas are not created equal.  Students must be able to develop their thoughts based on knowledge, facts, and logical reasoning.  They must be able to see beyond the surface of things.  To be educated is a way of looking at the world—analytically, critically.  My primary goal as a college instructor is to foster this critical thinking ability.  As English composition is usually one of the first classes students undertake in their college careers, it is often the first opportunity to introduce students’ minds to a more sophisticated, college level way of thinking.  It’s a goal more important than developing a sense of style or voice.  Most students will not become professional writers, but English composition is required for all.

            To achieve this goal of developing students’ critical thinking ability, I have created an interdisciplinary method of instruction.  Noted French filmmaker Jean Renoir once said that “learning is being able to see the relationship between things.”  I use texts from multiple pop culture arenas to show students how to look critically at the texts they’re confronted with daily, to interrogate the cultural messages they receive constantly, to gain a fuller understanding of the world around them.

            The next step is simply putting that understanding into words.  Some might object to my use of the word “simply” and say this step is not so simple.  But I find that if students really have something to say, it’s very easy to get them to say it or write it.  They already have a thesis, a focus, and a purpose—half of the six higher order concerns of composition.  Teaching the other three—a sense of audience, fully developed ideas, and logical and clear organization—provides my secondary goal in an English composition class.

The first task of getting students to be able to assess a writing situation and structure their writing appropriately for a reader is often partially accomplished by making the students aware that there are different writing situations and that, with the exception of journal writing, all writing is meant to be read by someone.  Just as young people understand that certain language should not be used in front of their parents, they can understand that formal writing involves a different kind of language than the e-mail messages they rattle off to their friends.  The more difficult part of this first task is getting students to write clearly for a reader; often, because the writer understands what he or she is trying to convey, that writer has difficulty recognizing that the ideas are unclear to the reader.   The teacher of writing must then urge to the writer to be a critical reader of his or her own writing.

The task of teaching students to develop their ideas is, in some ways, the most difficult because development is a nebulous concept.  The questions of when an idea needs more interrogation or explanation, or when an idea is fully developed have no definitive responses.  It’s not a matter of referring to answers in the back of the book.  However, if students can think and read critically, my main focus in a writing course, they can begin to address questions of “how,” “why,” and “to what effect” in their own writing.

The third task—teaching organization skills—is often managed through assigning outlines.  Outlines can be useful to get some students to envision their papers as coherent wholes and see the relationships the ideas have to one another.  However, this method is not useful for all students.  Some students naturally place ideas in a logical order; for these students, outlines are merely busy work.  The process approach to writing fails to take into account that students’ brains work differently.  As a student, when I was required to write an outline for an essay, I would always write the paper first and then create the outline to satisfy the assignment.

The limits of the traditional process approach involving three stages—prewriting, drafting, and revising—are particularly apparent today, when much composing is done on computers where text can be easily modified, moved, or otherwise manipulated, allowing the once strictly delineated stages to blend together.  With new technology and an understanding that not all students learn in the same way, this approach, once thought of as the great leveler in composition (we may not all be natural writers, but we can all put effort into accomplishing basic intermediary steps, regardless of the quality of the final product), seems as antiquated as its predecessor the error approach.

I once had a mentor who was a strict adherent of the error approach.  She said, “If students can memorize basic rules for math, why can’t they do the same for English?”  The answer to that question is that not all students can memorize those rules for math, and trying to get those to students to memorize rules for English creates an English phobia similar to the one students face in regard to math.  Although a certain level of grammatical proficiency is important to convey ideas and do so convincingly, a strict focus on grammar and mechanics not only eliminates questions of the quality of content, but also alienates, bores, and confuses students more than it instructs.  I try to keep my grammar instruction to a minimum, focusing on teaching students to write clear, coherent, and complete sentences.  This minimum of grammar instruction allows for greater attention to content and allows students to understand more fully major grammatical concepts rather than being overwhelmed or confused by minutiae.

Ultimately, my philosophy and methodology of teaching has been influenced by my experience as a student and as a writer.  I know that what worked for other students often didn’t work for me, and what worked for me was often useless to other students.  I try to leave as much flexibility as possible in my classes, so I can tailor the instruction to the needs of particular students and their skill levels.  This flexibility is particularly important in the community college classroom because any one class can contain students of widely divergent abilities and levels of development.  Nevertheless, I maintain common standards for achievement for all my students.  Students must clearly know what is expected of them and successful completion of a course must mean just that.