Experience Summary
I've been a teacher at the secondary and post-secondary levels for over ten years, and I've amassed experience working with students from a broad range of backgrounds and academic needs. Beginning with my years teaching high school and continuing through my time as an adjunct instructor, I have developed a solid understanding of the challenges students currently face as they seek an education that takes a creative and inspired approach toward their learning, and of what it means to provide a learning environment that builds and maintains a positive and healthy relationship between teacher, student, and subject while providing students with the critical thinking and writing skills they will need in order to thrive, both intellectually and emotionally, in what has become a difficult and competitive social and economic environment.
Teaching Style
My experience as a both a writer and reader has been instrumental in developing my ability to relate to students the specific rewards and challenges inherent to the disciplines, and I've found this to be of more practical value to the effectiveness of my teaching than anything else. At the heart of my philosophy is the belief that a student should find in a teacher a model for how to approach a subject, some reflection and validation of their own experiences, and some direction for how to negotiate the multiple paths down which those experiences may lead. The practice of this belief demands that I approach the subject as a facilitator of this experience, as something of a master-student, if you will, rather than a teacher. My primary goal is to help students develop identities as writers and readers that will serve both their personal and academic lives, and this often has the effect of creating a mutual respect and loyalty in my classes from which both my students and I learn and grown. Indeed, this is, in my experience, the biggest and best reward teaching can offer.