Teaching
A teacher is always teaching. Whether leading a seminar discussion in the classroom, coaching drills on the athletic field, or doing something mundane as walking down a hallway, we are always teaching because our students are always watching and learning.
In some ways, my current role as a high school English teacher is not that different from my previous one teaching at the college level. Over my eight years of teaching college writing and literature courses, I gained experience educating students from a broad set of academic and cultural backgrounds. I learned to teach foundational writing and literary concepts, to scaffold more complex intellectual tasks, and to help my students analyze texts in terms of their specific literary contexts as well as their larger rhetorical goals.
I rely on all of these skills every day in my role as an English instructor at Xavier College Preparatory High School. But I’ve found that high school students demand different activities. They need to be active, so I minimize lecture and instead lead seminar-style discussions. They need to move, to visualize, to touch, and to hear. Therefore, my students work together diagramming arguments at the whiteboard with colored markers. They create songs that help them recall literary devices.
Moreover, I’ve found that when working with texts that contain unfamiliar language or subjects, high school students benefit when we meet them halfway. For example, in studying Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, my students might reimagine the text’s conceptual blocks in terms of social media posts and memes for Twitter or TikTok. Such exercises help my students hone their skills in information literacy at the same time that they practice composing multimodal essays. This interpretive strategy permits students to take texts considered sacrosanct and make them accessible through forms that are to us unconventional, but to our students are common. Such a sense of play enables students to experiment as they wrestle with serious subjects like class, race, or gender. As young people read, they inevitably encounter complicated, emotionally-charged problems with which they have limited experience. They may become overwhelmed and hesitant to speak for fear of criticism from either their instructors or their peers. Yet engagement with these types of issues is essential for our students to become adults capable of participating in a democratic society.
At the same time, the more I teach secondary school, the more I realize that I teach in subtle ways that often have little to do with the field of Language Arts. Our secondary school students absorb everything as they seek to understand what it looks like to be responsible citizens in this complex, exhilarating, sometimes dangerous world. Our students learn from our tone, our body language, and our smallest interactions. I model respect when I recognize my student in the dining hall, self-discipline as a coach on the athletic field, courtesy when I yield to someone in a crowded hallway. This type of teaching is just as important as anything I can do for students as an instructor of writing and a scholar of literature. Expertise in the classroom can help students develop skills in critical thinking, writing, and information literacy. We can impart the multi-faceted symbolism of The Scarlet Letter, and demonstrate how to hear the difference between iambic and trochaic tetrameter. But indirect teaching helps our students develop into responsible, compassionate, humble citizens equipped to lead purposeful lives in a global society.
I’ve written about my experiences teaching texts like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in the digital age and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the post-truth era for the website Pedagogy and American Literary Studies. I’ve also written there about what teaching secondary school has taught me about teaching first-year college students. A peer-reviewed article that outlines my methods for teaching race through defamiliarization appeared in the January 2016 issue of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Language, Literature, Composition, and Culture.
Teaching is a serious thing. Our work inside and outside the classroom has consequences for the daily lives of our students, their future as individuals, and for the sustainability of our society. As teachers and adults, we possess vast expertise and experience that we can pass along to young people. But in order to help our students to engage with difficult ideas and texts, we must also strive to make them accessible and enjoyable. This is the challenge and the reward of teaching English at a college preparatory high school.
Teaching Experience:
Xavier College Preparatory High School (2017-present)
ENGL 3: Great Books/AP Language and Composition
ENGL 3: AP Language and Composition
ENGL 3: Honors English: Survey of American Literature
ENGL 2: Honors English
Arizona State Univeristy (Online) (2023-present)
Masters Level:
E501: Approaches to Research
E538: Approaches to Shakespeare
E568: WWII in Literature
Undergraduate:
E308: Form and History/Culture
E327: English Research and Methods
Scottsdale Community College (2016-17)
ENGL 101: First-Year Writing I
ENGL 102: First-Year Writing II
Arizona State University (2016)
ENGL 101: First-Year Writing I
George Mason University (2016)
ENGL 302M: Advanced Composition
Shenandoah University (2015)
ENGL 101: Freshman Composition
University of Delaware (2010-2015)
ENGL 204: American Literature
ENGL 110H: From Taliban to Timbuktu: Politics, Romance, and "The Middle East"
ENGL 110H: The Monstrous and the Human
ENGL 110: English Composition
University of Houston (2008-2010)
ENGL 1303: English Composition I
ENGL 1304: English Composition II