Background

I have been a teacher for a little over ten years, have taught on both coasts and Texas and at the high school and college levels. While I always loved academics, I never saw myself as a teacher. My undergraduate degree is in English literature simply because I was interested in the analysis, but I began my professional life in public relations. While pursuing a master’s in composition, I learned just as much about teaching composition as writing it. My career path changed and I found myself firmly cemented in the academic community I always loved.

My academic and professional backgrounds include the following:

• Bachelors Degree in English Literature from University of Connecticut
• Masters of Arts Degree in teaching English composition from San Francisco State University;
this included a year-long master’s thesis studying the transition students must make from high school to
college composition and the gap many sink or swim through.
• English teacher for college-prep curriculum at a private school in San Francisco for over six years.
• Adjunct faculty for teaching remedial and college-level composition at community colleges and state universities.
• Adjunct faculty for teaching a dual credit composition and British literature college curriculum to qualifying high school seniors.

Besides classroom curriculum, I have an added interest in tutorial and one-on-one work. In San Francisco, where I truly did leave a small part of my heart, I developed an after-school Writing Center that provided teacher and peer tutoring to a high school of 500+ students, seminars for seniors working on their college application essays, training programs for student tutors, and faculty workshops. This combined classroom and tutorial experiences triggered my idea for this website, to help when a teacher isn’t around to.

Teaching Philosophies and Other Thoughts

One of the biggest epiphanies I had during my master’s work came from the professor of my Basic Writer’s course. This course prepared us to teach students required to take remedial courses in college, before they could take college-level composition classes. At the time, 50% of entering college students did not qualify for college-level composition in the state of California. Anyway, my professor pointed out that teachers were often good students. We think and thrive in a traditional academic environment. However, many of our students don’t.

Teachers often fall into traps of assumptions; what worked for them will work for their students. Yet, it seems fewer and fewer students have personality traits conducive to the traditional, linear thought processes of school. With the argument of public school reform aside, far…far aside because we can’t do anything about it here, there are many things students can do for themselves to strengthen their academic navigation skills, especially in the writing arena.

Unlike science and history, a writing teacher teaches a skill not a subject. This means that I teach something they will need to use in many if not all aspects of their academic lives and beyond. Therefore, the need for success is even more crucial and begins with managing expectations, confidence and perception. Remedial writers can become advanced writers. Advanced writers can become extremely proficient writers.

A writing teacher’s role is more of a guide than an authoritarian, guiding students to discover what they already know from their own experiences, helping them apply that knowledge to academic and personal life and showing them how to develop beyond that knowledge to their next levels of thinking, organizing and writing.

Ok, I’ll stop here. Don’t get me started on the SAT essay exam!