- There’s
no one-size-fits-all way to teach. You must find a teaching method that is
compatible with your own personality.
- Students
are smart. They can smell B.S. a mile away. Be authentic and have a real
passion for what you do. Your students can smell not only B.S. but
boredom, lethargy, and complacency and if they detect this in you, they
will eat you alive.
- Follow
Oscar Wilde’s edict: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.” By
this, he does not mean be a phony. Find an identity, a larger-than-life
character, for your students to hang on to. If you don’t, they will
project their own image of you and what they project is never as effective
as the identity you create. Always be in control of the message.
- Related
to Principle #3, leave your pedestrian personality at home. In class, be
your most exaggerated self, one filled with huge passions and a gargantuan
appetite for your subject, so that your enthusiasm with be contagious.
- Know
your students don’t want to sit in class and hear you talk about
composition. Therefore, you must impose your will on them and find a way
to persuade them to believe that what you’re talking about is the most
compelling point of their attention. This requires immense energy and
preparation. Not all are cut out to go muster the sheer will that can
dominate their students’ attention and imagination.
- Related
to Principle #6, always assume your students are bored with your subject
and their minds are on other things: food, relationships, job, whatever.
To win their attention, always use a grotesque, hyperbolic anecdote
(painting yourself as a hero or an innocent victim) and find a way to
transition the story to your lesson plan.
- Always
assume your students know nothing. Just because they’re in freshman
composition, for example, doesn’t mean they know how to write a paragraph
or distinguish a clause from a phrase.
- Always
remember that your vocabulary of 200,000 words is bigger than the average
American’s, which is about 20,000 words. Write down or explain any
“vocabulary” word you might use.
- Whenever
possible, make them fearful of their ignorance, for example telling them
that a composition with as many as 3 comma splices or fragment sentences
will be discarded at the university level and that these errors are
considered so egregious that students guilty of these errors will be
escorted off campus by the college police.
- Never
accept late essays. Tolerating late essays always encourages other, more
grievous irresponsible behavior, which will contribute to classroom chaos.
I'm likely taking my first rhetoric / composition course next semester. Teaching writing in the digital age or something similar. I'm worried, I've never done rhetcom before and my grammar has gone to absolute trash over the past year and a half or so.
Posted by: Jesse Menn | October 31, 2009 at 11:46 AM
I always say to my students, "You know why I know so much about grammar? Because someone's giving me a paycheck to know about it, that's why."
Posted by: Jeffrey McMahon | October 31, 2009 at 12:32 PM