Teaching traditional “English” was never my ambition. When I considered teaching as a high school student, I wanted to teach media: journalism, photography, and television production. By college, I knew computers and networks were the future, so I imagined I might also teach about technology as it relates to communication.
I assumed my path was towards “communication” or “media” — wherever journalism was heading. There was no desire to teach literature or grammar, or anything of the sort.
My passions for design, technology, business, and politics led me to study “rhetoric” because this ancient discipline studies the art and science of persuasion — the core of everything else I enjoy. In the end, all rhetoric in our culture is narrative. We learn through stories. We argue through stories. We interpret our own lives through the stories we tell ourselves.
Rhetoric is neither synonymous with nor contained within English. It is not “writing studies” and certainly not academic composition. The scope of rhetoric is beyond what an English department can contain. English should not be the home of rhetoric, a field that is language-independent. Rhetoric began as the study of persuasive speech, but those ancient scholars studied far more than words.
I’m a rhetorician working in English, teaching courses about topics on which I am not an expert.
I work insanely long hours to learn what I am about to teach. That’s not healthy for me, though I hope I at least ask questions that lead to genuine learning among my students. To teach academic composition, I sacrificed family time and sleep. Now, I will be teaching another semester in English.
The courses, “Critical Reading,” is part of a full year, first-year composition program. I am a slow reader. My difficulty reading leads me to read narrowly, and I quit reading anything I don’t find valuable or enjoyable. It takes me weeks to read a book, maybe months. It isn’t that I don’t read, but that I would never try to read as much as I’m going to assign to my students.
I could take a radical view of reading and show films, I suppose. I am going to shape the course sections I teach around my interests, certainly, so at least I can feel a little more confident about the content of the texts I assign.
This will be one last semester in an English department.
Call it my ethical dedication, call it my black-and-white morality, call it whatever you want, but I don’t believe I’m the best teacher for these subjects. I am uncomfortable in this position. That’s not good.
I dislike how college composition is often taught, and I don’t feel great about a mandated reading course. I’ll do my best to elevate the course I’m teaching so it is valuable to students.
And when this school year ends, I am not teaching within an English department again. Students deserve much better.
Of course, I’d love to teach a media course, but that’s unlikely now.
If I teach again, it will be a few years from now and probably in another state.