Since I am in Paris for this semester, I am doing a couple of asynchronous courses online. One of those is my “Who is the Black Panther?” course for a literature and composition course. The other is a rhetoric and composition course, the first in the writing sequence. For that course, I am framing it, as I usually do, around personal essays, getting students … Read More How Does One Become a Better Writer? Read! Write! Repeat!
+ american literature, Dorthy Starchey, literacy, Literature, Pedagogy, reading, Stefan Zweig, walt whitman
Whenever I teach an early American literature survey course, I know that most students didn’t choose to take the course because they wanted to read American literature before 1865. Most students took the course because it filled their general education requirement and fit the time slot that they wanted for a course. It’s as simple as that. However, almost every time I teach the course, … Read More The Power of Literature and Education in Our Lives
+ kin gordon, Pedagogy, rooster, teaching, writing
Every year, as the spring semester comes to a close, I think about some of the things I have tried to teach students over the course of the semester and academic year. As a composition teacher, my main goal is to help students become better writers and readers, and hopefully, through that combination, become better students in the process. If they can hone their … Read More What Does Writing Mean for Students?
Whenever I think about my, at this point, quarter century of teaching at both the high school and university level, I contemplate how I even became a teacher. As I’ve written about before, barely graduated with my undergraduate degree in secondary education and minor in English. I struggled my first few semester teaching high school, and those struggles led me to graduate school and ultimately to … Read More Some Pedagogical Changes in My Teaching Over the Past Twenty-Five Years
Speaking about writing Black Panther for Marvel back in 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates, when asked about the challenges of writing comics, responded by saying, “It’s a very backwards — in my mind — process of writing. I mean, it’s the process of writing screenplays, of writing comic books, but it’s nmot the process of writing journalism.” Writing comics requires one to think about multiple aspects … Read More Highlighting for Students the Process of Writing Comics
