I became a teacher because I love to learn in school. My parents were both educators (my father a community college math teacher and my mother a grade school nurse) and they instilled in me the importance of education.

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My philosophy of teaching is that language is beautiful. All writing is creative writing. Writers aren’t born, they’re made. Anyone can learn to do it with the right attitude and motivation, which is to say, they must want to do it. I believe writing must be learned; it cannot be taught by depositing the knowledge novice writers need to be good writers. Student writers must practice. I teach mostly first-year composition. That’s what I was trained to do. I can create conditions where learning can take place, and that’s what I try to do in class. In class, we write a lot.

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To understand how I arrived at my current philosophy, it is helpful to understand my background. Having a math teacher for a father, I became proficient at numbers quickly. It was my best subject in school. I didn’t read much as a youngster, so reading comprehension was my worst subject. In writing, I was average. I was and remain a good speller.

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As a child, I wanted to be the hero Spartacus, the main character in the 1960 eponymous film. I watched the movie with my father and fell in love with the character. It was easy because he was a slave who broke out of prison, inspired his fellow freed slaves to fight the Romans, and earned the love of all who followed him. There were many touching scenes in the movie. I remember clearly the last fight scene where Spartacus and his friend Antoninus are forced to fight each other to the death for the tyrannical general Crassus’s amusement. They both try to kill each other, not for malice, but to spare the other from the awful fate of crucifixion. Spartacus, being the better fighter, kills Antoninus. In one another’s arms, they say “I love you” to each other before Spartacus ends his best friend’s life.  

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Because of my difficulties in English learning, it was my hardest subject. Because of my love of Spartacus and my desire to be like him, I knew I wanted to choose the hardest path possible so that I might too, one day, be a hero, like he was. When it was time to choose, I chose to pursue the study of English because it was the harder path. To be like Spartacus, I had to have it difficult.

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But it wasn’t all difficulty. Another early influence on my decision to study reading and writing was an English class I took in 10th grade. Even though it was a weak subject for me (I didn’t have the proper reading background that some other children had), I fell in love in my sophomore year with the transcendentalists and 19th century American literature. Particularly, it was Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson who inspired me; Thoreau with his civil disobedience and experiment at Walden Pond and Emerson with his empowering “Self-Reliance.” My teacher was a young man from Santa Cruz, California who looked young, maybe 35 years old. He was young and vibrant and inspiring, not unlike Professor Keating, the professor played by Robin Williams in the movie Dead Poets’ Society that came out in 1989, the same year I was a sophomore. I still remember from his classroom a poster of Confucius that read, “Great teaching is never forgotten.” I saw, from Mr. Sinclair, the sophomore English teacher, that words could be beautiful in a way that numbers could not, although now I fully appreciate both!. An English major was born.

 

I struggled with English at my undergraduate university, University of California at Berkeley. It was not easy. I worked hard on papers for days and weeks while friends wrote them hours before they were due, and I received a B while they received an A-. It made no sense and frustrated me. It wouldn’t be until graduate school and the discovery of writing process that I would begin to be inspired to teach.

I teach writing process. Even though they worked and wrote in the 1970s, writing process educators such as Donald Murray and Peter Elbow still inspire me. For me, writing process became a way to go from nothing, a blank page, to something, a completed assignment. It still took a long time to learn to control over my language, but process gave me a way to get there. I try to instill this process in my writing students.

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I tell my students, “You don’t have to love writing. I hope you do, but you don’t have to. You don’t even have to like it. But make sure you pass the class.” At my institution, classes that I teach have been deemed “barriers to success” for too many students. What the administration means is that they want more students to pass. Again, my love for writing keeps me motivated and standards high, although I continually experiment with policies and techniques that I hope help more students succeed. I try to do the best job I can while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

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And, last but not least, I try to keep good humor. It should be fun and relaxed environment at the end of the day. So laugh a little while learning to write. Remember Socrates: "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."