Experience Summary
I hold an M.A. and an M.Phil. in English Language and Literature (with a concentration in Renaissance literature) from Yale University and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of New Mexico. For the past year and a half, I have been a full-time, tenure-track Instructor of English at the Carlsbad branch of New Mexico State University. I have taught a wide variety of courses in English composition and literature at Yale, UNM, NMSU, and Central New Mexico Community College for the last six years, including courses in developmental and college-level composition, technical writing, traditional grammar, literary criticism and theory, world literature, the Bible as literature, Shakespeare, Milton, modern poetry, and contemporary fiction, often carrying enormous course-loads. I have also collaborated with colleagues on numerous administrative committees and have a wealth of experience tutoring and counseling students of all ages and from a vast diversity of cultural backgrounds. But I am particularly interested in reaching out to younger students (as well as their parents) fortifying and equipping them both with an array of knowledge of the world and with vital interpretive and critical-thinking skills.
I am an obsessive reader by temperament, and I try as hard as possible to imbue my students with the same insatiable intellectual curiosity. My scholarly interests have expanded over the years to encompass a broad knowledge of history and international politics. Even in my composition courses, I strive to offer my students as broad and detailed an exposure as possible to an enormous range of disciplines, drawing upon primary source texts from ancient, medieval, and modern history, philosophy, theology, political theory, art and music history, and literature—from the Babylonian Enuma Elish to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice to Marx’s Capital to the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
I believe that strong teachers must be free to improvise and adapt their style to suit the mutable and spontaneous needs of students. No serious topic should ever be suppressed from discussion. Though this liberty may take a classroom discussion into risky territory, the teacher’s aim must be to guide students in learning to address uncomfortable issues in a mature and responsible fashion.
There is a constant temptation to over-orchestrate lessons, merely leading students to give rote responses to a narrowly limited array of questions. When a teacher proposes a question for discussion, it must be an authentic question, not a “leading” or “fishing” question. The teacher must risk asking questions to which he or she does not already possess an answer, must encourage collaborative interpretations by revealing the limitations of his or her own understanding. A question to which one already knows the answer is not really a question; it is a recipe for intellectual laziness, and a lesson built upon such questions is an alienating catechism, not a discussion.
A good teacher must respect the intelligence of students, never seeking to impose doctrine as an unassailable authority. Perhaps most essentially, a good teacher must remain a student him or herself, never supposing that he or she has finally learned enough. A teacher who ceases to learn and re-think familiar topics can only be a bad influence.