Why I Teach

The four different ways I perceive teaching—as a job, as a career, as a profession, and as a calling—effect the reasons why I teach. When I look at teaching as a job, my reasons for teaching are practical—it pays the bills. People give me money every month for a service I provide and with that money, I can purchase what I need to survive, whether the rent on a one bedroom apartment or 20 frozen dinners or a new winter coat. My reasons for teaching as a career are practical as well. My family values teaching as a stable career that has relatively good benefits and can be pursued no matter where I live. Usually, unless I choose to work in the inner city, teaching as a career is safe, and the people I associate with, for the most part, are educated with similar moral values and beliefs. When my child was young, teaching provided a way for me to be with him when he wasn’t in school without having to rely on daycare as most other working mothers did. As a career, teaching also offers the opportunity for long periods of rest with Christmas, spring break, and summer vacations. A career and a profession may seem like synonyms for each other, but they are separate entities to me. To me, a profession means that higher level of education necessary to hold a white-collar job, important coming from a family whose ancestors were mostly farmers, and not necessarily well-educated ones. My mother’s family emphasized the importance of education, to become part of the professional class, not only for the security it offered but also because it meant achieving the dream of having their children be more successful than they were. While teachers may not be held in the same esteem as they were a generation ago, they are still viewed as professionals. Everyone can’t teach. It requires learned skills and inherent talents. While all these viewpoints (job, career, and profession) have contributed to why I teach, the one that is the most esoteric and, therefore, the most difficult to explain is the last, teaching as a calling. A calling is an evangelical term with all its connotations. In its original meaning, God chooses someone to preach and teach. He speaks to that person in a voice that cannot be ignored. There is also the idea that money does not matter if one is called. The experience itself and the subsequent place in heaven is the reward. Teaching is like that for me in some ways. I want to help other people, not just to succeed in life, to be able to write and read and think critically, but to thrive in life. To see the beauty and horror of the English language in all its power, to appreciate those who can mold it to create experiences that they can share, to feel the power of story as it shows the ways others have gone before them, and, perhaps, to be able to become those who can contribute to the next generation. That is why I teach.

Post-Process Assignment

A post-process assignment that I have used it one that was developed for the Senior Project at my high school. Students had to choose a topic for which they could write an essay and produce a product. There were then several major deadlines that had to be met, including writing a letter of intent, finding a mentor, composing several drafts, spending a certain amount of time on their product, presenting their product, and giving an oral presentation which covered both their papers and products. The choice of topic was left completely to the student. The topics were as varied as the students. Some students chose to write about artists like Chegall or Rivera and then create works that mimicked these artists. Others studied animal reproduction and learned how to artificially inseminate cows or how to raise a healthy animal in a feed lot. Some chose a sport, like boxing or golf, and either learned it or taught others how to participate in it.

Composition Video Draft

WHAT AND HOW: With the spirit of Women’s Ways of Knowing as our structure, we will examine the evolution of the academic feminine voice through inter-generational interviews with female graduate students and female faculty members at differing career levels and examine “how they define powerful learning experiences and go about gathering knowledge and making meaning” (10). These interviews will focus on personal narratives of the search for the feminine voice, its place in the academy, the tools to unearth it in our students, and the means to preserve it.

To focus our discussion, the following questions will be posed:

1. Why did you decide to go to graduate school and did that decision empower you as a woman or did you feel devalued in any way because of it?
2. How would you define feminine voice and do you believe that it is different from academic voice? Why or why not?
3. Have you ever experienced or know of an experience of intellectual sexism in academe? If so, what was it?
4. “As one moves up the professional ladder, one observes and increasing defeminization – increasing cognitive and professional authority appears to correlated with decreasing femininity.” –Women’s Ways of Knowing. Do you feel you have or might lose all or part of your feminine identity to conform to the masculine world? Why or why not?We will also include data concerning the graduate program at Texas Tech as it relates to female graduates at the various levels. In addition, we hope to explore the gender make-up of the English department as well.

WHY: To document the evolution of the feminine voice in academia from different perspectives. Yes, some researchers have done so on paper, yet no one has considered the visual.

Research Project: Woman’s Ways of Knowing: Going beyond the B.A.
Group responsibilities:
1. Coming up with a decent title.
2. Creating time and work deadlines.
3. Setting up time to work together on the combination of individual work.
4. Writing the two-three page essay.

Individual responsibilities:
1. Each member will interview four women, graduate students or professors, using only the agreed upon questions. She should make sure the participants have signed a permission slip for use of the video in a class project. She will be responsible to set up the interview times, get all equipment ready, check for room readiness (Room 455 on the white wall), and prep the interviewee by giving that person the questions in advance. (This will take at least 5-6 hours.)
2. Each member will be download each interview, using the Macs in the MOO or Dr. Rice’s classroom, and the I-movie program, in order to have consistency and avoid incompatibility problems between programs and computers. Remember each download takes as long as each interview. A 30-minute interview takes 30 minutes to download. (This will take approximately 3 hours.)
3. Each member will be responsible for editing the interviews to fit time constraints. If we are making an hour video and have ten questions, total response for each question can be no more than six minutes (This six minutes would have more than one answer from an interviewee but cannot have all the answers from all the respondents.). Therefore, each member should only pick the very best answers to put into the videotape. (This may take 6-10 hours.) All interview editing must be completed before Thanksgiving if we want the entire video completed by the 29th.
4. Each member will be required to work with the other members to complete the project in the final editing stages. This may require an entire afternoon (or more) early in the week of Nov. 26, late in the week of Nov. 19, or over that weekend between the two, which is Thanksgiving.

Individual member responsibilities:
Vicki—Create intro, transition, and credit pieces. Find and underscore with music where necessary.
Janna—Provide research information about female grad students.
Beatriz—Demographics from various departments used.

Process

Watching students gather for class, I can see a pattern. First, the students who are 30 minutes to an hour early camp out in front of the classroom. Some pick a seat, slump over and go to sleep. Some read, frantically trying to make up for work they didn't do the week before. Some plug themselves in to their Ipod, and just stare into space. About 10-15 minutes before class, most of the students begin to arrive, taking the last available seats, then the floor closest to the door of their classroom, then standing. They rarely talk. Many times it is quieter than a library.
Finally, the teacher arrives, opens the door and they pour into the classroom. A few stragglers come in right at the time class begins.

I often wonder about the really early arrivals. Why are they there so early? Do they have to get rides? Are they limited to certain kinds of transportation that makes them come so early? Sometimes the Ipod drones give me the creeps. That vacant stare as they listen to music make it seem like they are getting a fix rather than enjoying the lyrics or the composition.

Use your inside voice!

When we discussed true voice, I began to think about my own voice. I'm sure most of you think I have a pretty distinctive one, but I know that in certain situations, my voice changes. When I talk to my students, the voice is subtly changed to match the situation, as it is when I talk to my professors, or friends, or even service clerks. I think we all know that different situations call for different language and different voices. As an English teacher, I notice that when I tell people what I do for a living, they almost always respond with "Oh, I better watch my grammar."

Once when I was golfing, I joined a threesome of men to play the back nine holes. When they found out what I did, they immediately began to speak more formally. That lasted until the 11th hole when I hooked my drive into the gunch and uttered (Okay, yelled) a profanity. Things became much more relaxed after that.

We all have expectations of how we should use language depending upon the situation. I find no problem in having different voices for academic purposes, for use with friends, for business use. They are all my true voices.

Service Learning

Service learning is one of the best ways for students to learn. Unfortunately, I don't feel that a 1301 Composition class is where that kind of learning should take place. In my view, 1301 is a basic course that students take to learn basic communication skills and techniques that are necessary for college. The three hours per week that is typical for this kind of course can barely cover the content they need. We only meet 1 1/2 hours per week. It's going to be almost impossible to overcome the lack of time available for service learning.

I've had students do many kinds of service learning projects, from making quilts for the homeless to organizing a walk-a-thon to raise money for cancer research. They were all worthy projects. The problem was that to be done well, they required huge amounts of time on the part of the student. A freshman with a full class schedule may not have the organizational and prioritizing skills to complete a successful project.

In addition, the tie-in to composition can be fairy difficult. If you want to teach students how to write an argumentative paper, it can be hard to combine that with a service project. In my experience, many students also mistake their research paper for a discription of their project. While this kind of description can be a necessary skill, it does not prepare the student to argue an issue, using support and examples from research.

Theory. What is it good for?

The problem I've always had with theory, whether it was a theory of reading or writing, literature or education, is its practicality. How can I use this in my teaching, researching, or writing? If I can't see a connection fairly quickly, then I'm tempted to dump it in the "never going to use this again" file in my brain (This file is deleted as soon as I sleep or no longer need it for an upcoming test or paper.).

I know that I should have a thorough awareness of how composition has developed and why it has changed over the years. These readings make sense to me, even though their use to me is that I shouldn't make the same mistakes that have occurred in the past. If only our politicians could learn from our own history as easily. Nevertheless, much of composition theory seems more concerned with artifice than the art of teaching.

In a sense, studying theory is like looking at a beautifully crafted Faberge egg. The theorists have devoted hours of work to create a wonderful theory, built carefully using only the best rhetoric and practice. My problem is that I need to make an omelet, and while delightful to behold, the Faberge egg is neither tasty nor nutritious.