Chapters 5&6

I enjoyed both the chapters that we read. While reading, I was happy that I have experienced most of what he is talking about. It made me feel as if I have had a good education and good teachers to base my teaching off of.

Chapter 5 Thoughts:

I like the thought of teaching from a microcosm. As a creative writing major, most of my classes were set up in this way. We usually discussed 2-3 poems each class, in a circle, with all of us being engaged. This happened with our own poetry, as well as poets that we were assigned to read for each class. When we were up, we were not allowed to speak until the end of our critique. This gave everyone a chance to speak without being influenced by the author's point of view. This also helped is in learning how to critique professional writers that we do not have in the room with us. At the end, each author was given to chance to clear up anything that they wanted to and speak honestly about the critique from the class. This was purely subject centered. We were focused around one poem and poet at a time. The teacher was as much a part of the discussion as the students were, offering insight from their own experience and learning, but never correcting what other students have said.

Our grades in these classes were never really based on our poems either. Although some teachers asked for certain forms that we had to write in, we never really had restrictions. Grades came from doing assignments, participation, and a few papers about our personal reaction to a certain book of poetry. We were not to look outside for others views on poetry, but we stayed within our own class. We never really consulted the "professionals", but drew our own conclusions.

Chapter 6 Thoughts:

I like the idea of learning as a community of teachers. I had 2 classes in my undergraduate career that were "team taught". My Southwestern Studies classes, which were my favorite and brought together so many subjects that I learned to love was set up this way. We had one teacher who gave us tests and grades and what now, but every other week we had another professor from another department come into class in order to give us their perspective. They also had a "jones" professor that was there more often and was in another department as well. The first class I took, our "jones" professor was my mentor, who was from the geography dept. The second class I took the "jones" professor was from the history department and basically studied Mexican-American history. Each professor brought their own views into the class, which was primarily a writing intensive english class. The great thing was that each professor taught us things that made sense in what we were reading. They gave new light to the situation and made us understand what we were reading about even more than simply looking at it from an "english major" point of view. I loved these classes! They were my favorite ones and they encouraged to me to take more electives that were outside of my field. I ended up taking classes from each of the Jones professors as electives so that I could better understand the Southwest and the literature that was written about the land.

This also made me think about one horrible teacher that I had. I had this woman twice in my college career. Once I had her in a class of about 150 students. She was AWFUL! She gave us assignments of about 500 pages to read a week and screamed at us when we didn't want to talk in class or had not done all of the assignments. I found out that her husband was the dean of the English department. I swore up and down that this had to be the reason why she had tenure because if anyone had ever watched her teach they would have been horrified. Plus, she got awful evaluations from students. The next class I had her in was a senior level class that was much smaller, about 20 students. She was different in this class. She still was not the best teacher, but I was able to realize that she was very specialized in a certain author that she loved. She taught this author's book in this class and her way of teaching improved dramatically. She also never had any outbursts in class. Even when we didn't read she sympathized with us. Although she was so late at getting papers back to us and unorganized as hell, I eventually came to understand that she was a little better than I had thought. I guess when she got to get to her subject and author that she loved, her teaching and people skills followed.