Teaching traditional \u201cEnglish\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
I assumed my path was towards \u201ccommunication\u201d or \u201cmedia\u201d \u2014 wherever journalism was heading.\u00a0There was no desire to teach literature or grammar, or anything of the sort.<\/p>\n
My passions for design, technology, business, and politics led me to study \u201crhetoric\u201d because this ancient discipline studies the art and science of persuasion \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Rhetoric is neither synonymous with nor contained within English. It is not \u201cwriting studies\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a rhetorician working in English, teaching courses about topics on which I am not an expert.<\/p>\n
I work insanely long hours to learn what I am about to teach. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The courses, \u201cCritical Reading,\u201d 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\u2019t find valuable or enjoyable. It takes me weeks to read a book, maybe months. It isn\u2019t that I don\u2019t read, but that I would never try to read as much as I\u2019m going to assign to my students.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This will be one last semester in an English department.<\/p>\n
Call it my ethical dedication, call it my black-and-white morality, call it whatever you want, but I don\u2019t believe I\u2019m the best teacher for these subjects. I am uncomfortable in this position. That\u2019s not good.<\/p>\n
I dislike how college composition is often taught, and I don\u2019t feel great about a mandated reading course. I\u2019ll do my best to elevate the course I\u2019m teaching so it is valuable to students.<\/p>\n
And when this school year ends, I am not teaching within an English department again. Students deserve much better.<\/p>\n
Of course, I\u2019d love to teach a media course, but that\u2019s unlikely now.<\/p>\n
If I teach again, it will be a few years from now and probably in another state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Teaching traditional \u201cEnglish\u201d was never my ambition. When I considered teaching as a high school student, I wanted to teach media: journalism, photography, and television…<\/p>\n