I feel uncomfortable with narratives of inspirational teachers and life-changing classes. Certainly education has the possibility of granting a student new abilities, new worldviews. But teaching is also a job, a craft you exercise for a few hours a week in exchange for pay. I think that sanctifying the inspirational quality of teaching/learning draws attention […]

As teachers and academics, we often spend a lot of time cultivating our worldviews. We refine a distinct and justifiable sense of how the world works, be that politically, historically, experientially, or physically. This level of complex perception, refined over time, motivates our thinking and our actions. When we teach students, we use the term […]

As much as we seek rapport with our students–rooted in empathy and mutual human understanding–we must also acknowledge the limits. We are different from our students, if only by virtue of our authority in the classroom. For this blog post, I want you to examine the role “difference” plays in your teaching. What makes you […]

Even if we can’t fully name them, we teachers tend to guide our actions–our sense of whether things are going well or poorly–based on some deeply held beliefs. What does it mean to learn? What should a classroom look like? Who should feel safe or vulnerable, and how? In our case, specifically to writing, how […]

I often find myself thinking about students as somewhat abstract–minds that are going to respond to what they’re presented with. This isn’t who or what my students are, of course. This is simply a projection, a way of seeing them as subjects of my plans, reactors to my action. They certainly aren’t living, breathing beings […]

For this blog post, I want you to think about the class English 101 as a whole: as a program with 80 sections of a required class taught per year. What do you think English 101 is to Western as an institution? What is the English 101 program to the students and faculty as a […]

For this short post, I want you to think about your classroom (or any classroom you are in this quarter) through a metaphorical lens. Describe your classroom as if it were a biological ecosystem, or a neighborhood, or a computer network, or a beehive, or some other collective structure. Try to capture the structures, expectations, […]

For your first short-form blog post, I’d like you to think back to your expectations for what it would mean to teach first-year composition. Perhaps you had ideas about your role in the classroom, of what it would be like to be The Teacher. Or perhaps you had ideas about the subject, and how you […]