Despite the grumbling and the fact that a 7-10PM class made for ridiculously long Wednesdays, I learned some ish, as one of my favorite 1101ers would say.
This post is to assure the dubious among you that ENC 6700 wasn’t a waste of your time. You will probably use the things you learned (assuming you were paying attention) more than you use your middle school Algebra since a fair percentage of us will inexplicably wind up spending many of our professional years at the front of classrooms. It’s what we word-loving people do when we’re not making things with words.
I spent 6 years teaching high school Language Arts with zero prior formal education in praxis/heuristics, etc. I had no idea that there were “theory camps” or that writer nerds have heated arguments about how we write and why we write. I had a few “Ooooooohhhh, THAT’S why teachers do that” moments this semester. And while the assignment that requires us to write our teaching philosophy might hurt our heads and feel like word manure, it is a valuable exercise in introspection and in the Greek maxim to “know thyself”.
Finally, to help you fill all the hours you won’t spend reading student essays during the break, a book suggestion from Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg.