10 Qualities of a Good College Composition Instructor

 

1. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to teach. You must find a teaching method that is compatible with your own personality.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Never accept late essays. Tolerating late essays always encourages other, more grievous irresponsible behavior, which will contribute to classroom chaos.      

Comments

[Jesse Menn]

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.

[Jeffrey McMahon]

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."