Far from the perfect professor with eidetic recall and charisma, I am the first to announce to students that I will make mistakes during a course. A humble writer aware of my jumbled recall, I rely on my research skills more than my memory. Charisma lacking, I hope students appreciate honesty more than charm.
Lectures can be effective, when they are participatory and interesting. TED Talks wouldn’t have audiences if the speakers didn’t manage to captivate audiences. Stand-up comedy represents a special form of lecture, too. It takes special skills, which I have not developed, to have people drawn towards you and on the edges of their seats.
The Greek philosophers we admire gave us the Socratic Method of dialogue and Platonic debate. They taught through narratives and discussions of those stories. They asked questions and guided students. That so many rhetoric and composition courses rely on lecture confounds me. We should model the pedagogies we admire.
My ideal is that students read and develop questions outside class. My online spaces offer many resources and guided activities, so when students come to class they should be ready to engage each other.
Knowing that I am not engaging, I hope that my students engage and motivate each other. That leads to more learning and better teaching through default.
Now that I am teaching my first true first-year composition and writing course since 2004, I will discover if my ideas work as well for first-year students as they do for advanced students working within their academic majors.
I’m going to blog generally on my experiences this year. I’ll do my best to offer critical analyses of what does and does not work in the writing course sections I’m leading.