Teaching Statement
A far cry from a model-student, Jesse liked to sit in the back row and speak only when spoken to. He was one of those students whose academic future didn’t seem too promising. From day one of the semester, I learned that he was drafted to play football for the university. From reading his memoir, a then-required project in the First-Year-Composition curriculum, I found out that the happiest time of his life was the day his daughter was born. Jesse had become a father at 14. In his memoir, he also shared that this was the first time he saw himself as a minority. He had lived in an exclusively black community in the Everglades until the day he moved to Tampa. He was currently experiencing culture shock.
That semester, I decided to have students read Toni Morrison’s controversial novel, The Bluest Eye. I was determined that they would leave ENC 1101 having read, discussed, and blogged about a novel by a contemporary author. Although I remembered that the novel raises sensitive, taboo issues, including molestation, incest, and menstruation, I did not realize just how poignant these topics were until we read the novel together—at times out loud—as a class.
By the middle of the semester, it was Jesse’s turn to read a section of the novel aloud and lead the discussion. He swaggered to the front of the class and began his presentation. As he stumbled over words and disregarded Morrison’s punctuation marks, I realized that he had probably never read aloud before, and quite possibly, had never read an entire novel before. But what he lacked in reading ability, he made up for in thought-provoking questions. He loved to explore black masculinity and family dynamics. At times, Morrison seemed to speak directly to him.
Shortly after I taught Jesse’s class, I attended the MLA Convention session where Gerald Graff was the main speaker. I had never heard an English professor, let alone the President of the MLA, talk with such honesty about the obscurity of academic discourse and his dislike for books as a young boy. Growing up as a middle-class Jew in an ethnically and financially mixed Chicago neighborhood, he said that reading wasn’t cool; it was a good way to get yourself beat up. He would bore of books quickly, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Graff put it: “I could see little connection between my Chicago upbringing and Huck’s pre-Civil War adventures with a runaway slave on a raft up the Mississippi.” That is, until he read the critics’ take on the novel. After chronicling his journey toward a realization that texts can have something to do with real life, he concluded his message by stating that writing works when we enter into a conversation with others and make our arguments in relation to theirs—what he calls the “they say/I say” model.
Expressing our ideas in response to some other person or group is what I stress in my classroom. To that end, I first spend time going over how to locate works that are worthwhile responding to, essentially how to mine the library’s catalog and databases. We practice the art of summarizing and quoting. Students then learn how to offer their informed opinions in the larger context of ongoing dialogue—agreeing with what someone stated, disagreeing, or a combination of the two. I then explain that doing this is not enough: we must contribute to the conversation, explaining why we disagree or adding something to our agreement. We work on organizing the supporting points, constructing topic sentences and transitions, and anticipating opposing arguments. To help them determine the credibility of sources, I remind students that knowledges are produced in multiple, intersecting—at times competing—narratives of the personal, political, and social. As in my scholarship, I include in the classroom the voices of groups that have been historically marginalized and silenced.
To help Jesse and others see the connection between The Bluest Eye and their own lives, we talked about how Morrison depicts the father figure and if her representation is an accurate portrayal of a black man in the United States. My students looked at that text and others through multiple lenses to complicate, in an effort to sharpen, their initial interpretations. They entertained as they anticipated opposing views.
In my developmental and first-year writing classroom, I give individualized attention to each student on every major assignment. This allows me to counsel students directly and address their personal writing challenges, charting their progress as new writers. Instead of traditional lectures, I employ the workshop model because, as writing is an inherently social process, the incorporation of the peer review model allows students to share ideas and invest in each other’s success. Furthermore, I find it to be the best format to help young writers develop their skills, the most important being the humility to receive feedback from others and the sharpening of their own critical eye in objectively revising their work.
One of my favorite activities to include in the composition classroom is to have students first write down their thoughts about a topic, which we then discuss together. Afterwards, we study texts that touch on that same issue. I then have them develop and revise their initial essays to incorporate the voice of these authors. For example, in one of my composition courses, I had students reflect on their experience with the education system. We then read and discussed selections from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the scene where she describes her eighth-grade graduation, and from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, in which she discusses the wrath of the nuns at the Catholic school she attended. Another topic we explored was war, reading selections from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and examining the famous Trang Bang picture from the Vietnam War. These exercises allow students to find the arguments the writers or photographers are presumably making and to add their own, now sharpened, responses.
I learned early on, namely from teaching Jesse, that all students have their own stories. My goal in the classroom is to help them transform their personal narratives into better-informed and more objective arguments, and to help them see that texts, even fictional works, can show us a lot about real life.
A far cry from a model-student, Jesse liked to sit in the back row and speak only when spoken to. He was one of those students whose academic future didn’t seem too promising. From day one of the semester, I learned that he was drafted to play football for the university. From reading his memoir, a then-required project in the First-Year-Composition curriculum, I found out that the happiest time of his life was the day his daughter was born. Jesse had become a father at 14. In his memoir, he also shared that this was the first time he saw himself as a minority. He had lived in an exclusively black community in the Everglades until the day he moved to Tampa. He was currently experiencing culture shock.
That semester, I decided to have students read Toni Morrison’s controversial novel, The Bluest Eye. I was determined that they would leave ENC 1101 having read, discussed, and blogged about a novel by a contemporary author. Although I remembered that the novel raises sensitive, taboo issues, including molestation, incest, and menstruation, I did not realize just how poignant these topics were until we read the novel together—at times out loud—as a class.
By the middle of the semester, it was Jesse’s turn to read a section of the novel aloud and lead the discussion. He swaggered to the front of the class and began his presentation. As he stumbled over words and disregarded Morrison’s punctuation marks, I realized that he had probably never read aloud before, and quite possibly, had never read an entire novel before. But what he lacked in reading ability, he made up for in thought-provoking questions. He loved to explore black masculinity and family dynamics. At times, Morrison seemed to speak directly to him.
Shortly after I taught Jesse’s class, I attended the MLA Convention session where Gerald Graff was the main speaker. I had never heard an English professor, let alone the President of the MLA, talk with such honesty about the obscurity of academic discourse and his dislike for books as a young boy. Growing up as a middle-class Jew in an ethnically and financially mixed Chicago neighborhood, he said that reading wasn’t cool; it was a good way to get yourself beat up. He would bore of books quickly, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Graff put it: “I could see little connection between my Chicago upbringing and Huck’s pre-Civil War adventures with a runaway slave on a raft up the Mississippi.” That is, until he read the critics’ take on the novel. After chronicling his journey toward a realization that texts can have something to do with real life, he concluded his message by stating that writing works when we enter into a conversation with others and make our arguments in relation to theirs—what he calls the “they say/I say” model.
Expressing our ideas in response to some other person or group is what I stress in my classroom. To that end, I first spend time going over how to locate works that are worthwhile responding to, essentially how to mine the library’s catalog and databases. We practice the art of summarizing and quoting. Students then learn how to offer their informed opinions in the larger context of ongoing dialogue—agreeing with what someone stated, disagreeing, or a combination of the two. I then explain that doing this is not enough: we must contribute to the conversation, explaining why we disagree or adding something to our agreement. We work on organizing the supporting points, constructing topic sentences and transitions, and anticipating opposing arguments. To help them determine the credibility of sources, I remind students that knowledges are produced in multiple, intersecting—at times competing—narratives of the personal, political, and social. As in my scholarship, I include in the classroom the voices of groups that have been historically marginalized and silenced.
To help Jesse and others see the connection between The Bluest Eye and their own lives, we talked about how Morrison depicts the father figure and if her representation is an accurate portrayal of a black man in the United States. My students looked at that text and others through multiple lenses to complicate, in an effort to sharpen, their initial interpretations. They entertained as they anticipated opposing views.
In my developmental and first-year writing classroom, I give individualized attention to each student on every major assignment. This allows me to counsel students directly and address their personal writing challenges, charting their progress as new writers. Instead of traditional lectures, I employ the workshop model because, as writing is an inherently social process, the incorporation of the peer review model allows students to share ideas and invest in each other’s success. Furthermore, I find it to be the best format to help young writers develop their skills, the most important being the humility to receive feedback from others and the sharpening of their own critical eye in objectively revising their work.
One of my favorite activities to include in the composition classroom is to have students first write down their thoughts about a topic, which we then discuss together. Afterwards, we study texts that touch on that same issue. I then have them develop and revise their initial essays to incorporate the voice of these authors. For example, in one of my composition courses, I had students reflect on their experience with the education system. We then read and discussed selections from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the scene where she describes her eighth-grade graduation, and from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, in which she discusses the wrath of the nuns at the Catholic school she attended. Another topic we explored was war, reading selections from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and examining the famous Trang Bang picture from the Vietnam War. These exercises allow students to find the arguments the writers or photographers are presumably making and to add their own, now sharpened, responses.
I learned early on, namely from teaching Jesse, that all students have their own stories. My goal in the classroom is to help them transform their personal narratives into better-informed and more objective arguments, and to help them see that texts, even fictional works, can show us a lot about real life.