First year college students are immersed into a new education style that they are unfamiliar with. As a first year composition instructor, I noticed so many of my students tell me that what I was asking for conflicted with what they were taught in high school. This seemed ludicrous to me, as my curriculum had been based around what East Carolina University had told me was necessary for students to know by the end of my course. I asked around to other instructors who taught this course, and they said I was not alone. Their students had said the same thing.
As someone who is interested in entering the high school classroom, I offer a unique skillset that other teachers don’t. My teaching experience comes from the college classroom, which gives me a greater understanding of where college freshman should be at in terms of writing as they enter the university.
Students can often become confused by the standards asked for them in a given English course, as there is a tough balance between composition and literary skills. This creates tension for some English teachers, as often one of these skills will fall to the backburner. I saw this all too often as a student my self, as I went into the college classroom unprepared for what awaited me.
Literature has always been a haven for me, as it becomes more than just reading strategies. So much of literature comes from discussing the text and understanding the contexts that surround it. Nothing gave me greater joy as an English student than to borrow what I had learned in one class and apply it to my English course. Literature is often conflated in the high school classroom, as nearly every student is forced to take this art appreciation over other art forms. As a general humanities lover, this infuriated me. I watched as my peers expected their students to appreciate literature as a high art form. This can alienate students from literature, and from reading. I teach literature as a cultural thermometer by asking my students what a given text says about the culture and the time it came from. This requires students to call upon their history and sociology skills in my classroom. Now my students are no longer just learning literature, but their learning across an entire curriculum.
A part of helping students learn is communal teaching. Students can be lost in a sea of different course work that all seems entirely segregated to individual classrooms. As a student myself, this happened far more than I’d had liked. As a teacher now, I find myself wanting to collaborate with other instructors to better accommodate students. College students come to the university for a number of different majors, so I often get questions from my various majors asking why they have to take my course. The course I’m teaching currently offers a solution to that, as the first half of the semester asks students to discover the types of writing in their major, while the second half has them mimic and learn that style. This often finds me asking business, nursing, and biology instructors ways I can help my students help themselves. I need to adapt my lessons to what my students are doing in their college careers and not expect my students adapt to me.
Teaching philosophies are hard to write in one page, so know that I could fill a book with my personal beliefs. I’ll leave by saying that my teaching is grounded in pushing my students to help themselves, and borrow on their own knowledge from all their course work.
