I believe in literature. My students, however, liken reading to working out, saying that while it might be good for you, it doesn’t feel good. I want to change their minds. Reading, I think, is an inherently pleasurable activity, and it is also good for us. For literature entertains, creates myth, increases our capacity for […]
Author: Zack
The Other
In some ways, responding to this prompt seems like a conscious act of othering. What’s not being looked at? What needs to be visible? Is it something we have, or think about that we want others to see? Some way we are different that makes us into an other? Is it something that we identify […]
Narrative Inquiries
Citation: Addison, Joanne. “Narrative As Method and Methodology in Socially Progressive Research.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research, edited by Katrina Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, Hampton Press Inc., 2012, 373-383 Summary: Author Joanne Addison creates an interesting article by weaving together her personal story of fostering a severely abused child and […]
Reading is a fun thing we can do
Questions: Since I saw the syllabus in Comp Camp, I’ve been thinking about how I can add more reading into the curriculum. As we’ve gone along, I’ve refined my ideas significantly. At first, it was just a vague desire to assign/read/talk about useful and interesting writing. I wondered: where was the place for literature in […]
The A-word
Growth requires stress. Even plants need certain stressors to produce to their fullest capacity. In many cases, the natural world delivers all the stress and adversity we need. Sometimes too much. But it is interesting to think of the role of a teacher as an agitator, an adversary. None of us want mean teachers who […]
By what metric?
I haven’t encountered much that I would term toxic to my class ecosystem. Let alone truly toxic. Theoretically, I would say that any violence in the classroom is toxic, destructive, unacceptable. If we’re making hierarchies, I would begin with physical violence. Any instance of fighting, assault, abuse, would seem immediately poisonous to my ecosystem, not […]
Did we read the same article?
Student A, You have written an interesting engagement with some of Mike Rose’s ideas here. You have a certain flair hiding out in your writing that I really enjoyed too. In particular, in the first paragraph, you write, “from an early age, putting a pencil to a paper seemed like to be the most impossible […]
Sometimes the title comes last
This feels somewhat similar to my last post where I peered into my students’ heads and watched their inner critics berate them into paralysis. From talking to them, I imagined them facing these harsh judges, speaking in the voice of English teachers past, who tell them their work isn’t good enough, saying things like “provide […]
The Tyranny of the Critic
The first thing that troubles my students about writing is the idea of it. They’ll have to sit down, sit still, concentrate, produce, be judged by standards they don’t always understand. Let’s look at these one at a time. The first hurdle is getting started. Most of them aren’t natural writers, aren’t particularly interested or […]
What it do
This class can… um… Maybe at its best, it teaches students a method of interaction. A way of being. Maybe it empowers them to speak and write in their own voice. To pursue what they care about. These are good things. It’s also a place for students to get personal attention they may need. Many […]
What’s a coherent worldview anyways?
Honestly, I have very little idea of how my students perceive themselves in the greater context of the world around them. On the one hand, there is the student who says Disney princesses and the portrayal of women in media “doesn’t have anything to do with him,” which shows me at the very least a […]
Ignorance and Wisdom
Sometimes I try to think about what I was like when I was a freshman in college. It’s possible that I came to my Freshman English equivalent with something of a bad affect. I remember being irritated by my classmates and the way everyone spoke out of what I thought of as self-aggrandizement. Vying each […]
Radical Expression
Citation: Burnham, Christopher. “Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/Practice.” A Guide To Composition Pedagogies, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick, Oxford University Press, 2001, 19-35. Summary: Expressivist pedagogy, Christopher Burnham tells us, is centered on the individual writer with a strong emphasis on voice. He turns to allies of expressivism such as bell hooks, working […]
The Shadow, mostly unexplored
Lynch, Paul. “Shadow Living: Toward Spiritual Exercises for Teaching.” College English 80:6 (2018): 499-516. Web. Summary: Paul Lynch takes us on a somewhat wobbly journey through the dark night of the teaching soul. He starts with an experienced teacher teetering on the edge, standing in class at 4pm, wondering what is happening, entering into a […]
Provide the Occasion
The more I read about teaching, and the more time I spend in front of a class, the less I seem to know. I can’t really describe a core principle of my philosophy or point to any one thing that informs my style. I think I would rather my students learn to think like writers […]
The coherence of bodies
It seems impossible to me to not be aware of my students as embodied beings. My experience of the world is so very much shaped by my shape. As my body moves through space, I feel the cold wind on my head after I’ve cut my hair, the rock in my shoe, the way people […]
Is Subversion Even a Thing?
Freshman English is not something I understand. I never took it myself, and now that I’m teaching it, I continue to fumble around in my conceptions of it. In class today, we were talking about the research proposal, looking ahead to the end of the quarter, and one student said, “I thought this was […]
Reading things that aren’t my comments (so that we can read my comments)
At first, I was only nervous that I would be a bad at this teaching thing. As time goes on, and my class has not turned on me or exploded in a thousand broken pieces, I’ve started to wonder what it might mean to be a good at it. I thought that writing extensive comments, […]
Flying in Formation
I’ve been thinking of my classroom as a pod, a sort of enclosed, self-sustained spaceship. We are a part of a fleet, flying in formation, traveling at roughly the same speed. We share a trajectory and a destination, but inside our little crafts, we have unique, perhaps even wildly different ecosystems. I like to think […]
Blog 1: Anxiety and Expectation
Anxiety and Expectation Before I started, I was having a lot of trouble creating a vision of my classroom. My past teaching experiences—substitute teaching in charter schools in Chicago, teaching ESL in Santiago—were unpleasant, restrictive, stifling. And yet, I’ve carried this idea of myself as a teacher, as wanting to teach for so long. […]