Who I am as a teacher….

Hhhhmmmm….I have to say this is a toughy. I honestly am not sure WHO I am as a teacher just yet. I think I know who I WANT to be, but I’m still working out the details. When I think about what kind of teacher I will be once I finally reach that step in my life, I mostly look back to those who have made an impact in my own life; I ask myself what it was they did to reach me. The first person that comes to mind was an English teacher I had at A&M who loved Latin. That man knew the Latin origin of any word you threw at him. What was so inspiring was how excited he got just talking about it. I looked forward to that class everyday (and it was an 8 AMer, so that’s a feat) because his excitement boiled over to the rest of the class. Everyone laughed and talked and wanted to be a part of the discussion. I think this is an important factor of my future teaching philosophy. I want to be so excited about a subject and have so much fun teaching it that my students cannot resist being excited also. This brings to mind one of my favorite quotes: “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” Maybe it could be modified to say, “Those who bring the excitement of learning into the lives of other….”
Another teacher whose methods had an impact was Mr. Rowe, another A&M professor who taught literature of the sea. His main goal was always to get us, the students, involved. We would discuss a book for awhile, and then Mr. Rowe would have some activity for us to participate in that brought to light some important aspect of our reading. I remember one class when we were reading Mutiny on the Bounty. We had been talking about the 15 or so men abandoning ship to survive in a dinghy for weeks and how much food they had. To convey to us the extreme hardship of the situation, Mr. Rowe brought rope to class and laid it out on the floor to form the shape and exact size of the dinghy in the book. He then called up 15 students to stand inside the “boat” and proceeded to hand out our rations of food, the same amount as those in the book, in plastic bags. Some had an old moldy cracker, others crumbled pretzels and still some, well, who knew what was in there. We then had to stand in the dinghy, almost nose to nose, with our baggy of food to last a week, and discuss the book for the rest of the class period. Man, did I feel sorry for those poor guys in the book once class was over. To this day, I think that was one of the coolest classes I’ve ever taken. I think this would be another main goal of my teaching philosophy. To get students involved. To bring to light aspects of a book (or whatever we are studying at the time) that are often overlooked as unimportant. I want to inspire curiosity and eagerness to learn.
I’m sure these are philosophies that every teacher strives for. As I’m still learning about teaching, I’ve got a long row to hoe. But I hope someday I will be one of those teachers, like the ones I remember from my education, about whom a student will say, “Man, she rocked!”

Concerning "The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers" by Ben Yagoda

Honestly, I cannot express how much I truly enjoyed this article. As a professional editor and graduate student (also professional according to my father), I encounter these mistakes on a daily basis. I also shake my head in sadness on a daily basis. It really is a sad state of affairs when the technology we have come to depend on - e-mail, instant messenger, blogs, etc. - quickly becomes the downfall of proper grammar and mechanics. But Yagoda is correct in pointing out that the badly edited nature of our technological communication has a startling effect on the prose of the current generation of students. And, honestly, it's not just the younger students who are affected. Last weekend I was helping a friend edit the first few chapters of her dissertation. She is 28, graduated from Texas A&M and received her masters from UT where she is also currently working on her PhD. I say this to prove that she is a well-educated individual. However, once I started editing her work, I realized my friend was, in fact, a comma fanatic. Commas, commas EVERYWHERE! I immediately called her up and suggested we read the dissertation together over the phone. I have found that proofreading out loud catches many more mistakes than reading silently and helps to straighten out awkward sentences. Once we started and I made a point to pause at each of her incorrect commas, then continue on, she was shocked. Her high school teacher had taught her if ever in doubt about commas, put one in. Oh my! And the fact that she made it through tons of college essays using this rule of thumb simply amazes me. So, although new technologies of online communication have a hand in the bad grammar of today’s writers, many of the mistakes have also been brought with them from grammar school and haven't been corrected in their later education.
Another rule of the article that I have experienced personally is the spell checker. Oh, how writers simply love this feature, and oh, how us who edit hate it. Spell check is a tool that has not only invaded my college career but also my professional. As an editor, I generally do two read-throughs of a title. I edit it the first time for grammar, punctuation, mechanics and style, and also make comments and suggestions for improvement. After the author has made the changes they feel necessary from my comments, they send it back to me for a final edit. Mind you, I have already edited for grammar and mechanics, and yet EVERY author feels the need to spell check it ONE MORE TIME before sending it back to me, thereby thoroughly wrecking all correct changes I have previously made. The frustration I feel for this nifty little tool in MS Word cannot be expressed. If I could blow smoke out of my ears, the gesture would come somewhat close to conveying what a complete nuisance I think the spell checker makes of itself.
Going back to the state of online communication and how it affects writers today, I will say again I agree this is a definite contributor to the state of student writing, but another is the simple fact of published prose. Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, etc., have all diminished in their editing of grammar/mechanics. And honestly, this cannot be blamed on authors, but rather editors (which I cringe to say). I cannot even count the number of times in the past month I had to put down the current popular fiction book I was reading or my copy of RT Book Reviews because all the spelling and punctuation mistakes were driving me crazy! And honestly, if a student is reading popular fiction or the like, and comes across grammatical errors, they probably think 'well, if John Grisham can do it, so can I'. This is not a good thing.
As I talked about with my example of my PhD friend’s dissertation, many grammatical rules, that may not be correct, are taught at a young age, or simply picked up by reading bad prose. It is our job, as future teachers, to catch these errors as soon as we can, and correct them. The writing mistakes of future scholars cannot be corrected all at once, but by catching and improving them one by one, we can slowly move our way back to a grammatically correct society. (And I just have to say, I write this essay in terror of everyone catching my own violation of the 7 deadly sins!)

You can't have a close-knit community in a distance relationship...

BELIEVE:
Distance Education (DE)/E-pedagogy is a relatively new concept for me. When I started undergrad, it was not yet strongly in practice. All my classes were face-to-face. In the following years, I was never in need of taking an online course for my daily job or outside interests, so the subject of DE was not one I thought about. After entering the online composition program this semester, DE is now at the forefront of my thoughts. Is it effective? Does it teach the students all they desire and fulfill their needs for community and interaction? I think yes, definitely. Although face-to-face interaction is taken away, except for the weekly class meetings, there is still a different kind of interaction that occurs online. Chat rooms, instant messaging and peer reviews (as was noted in Kurlioff's article) can replace face-to-face interaction and still provide the familiarity and camaraderie students crave. Also, often times, NOT being face-to-face with someone, but instead, chatting through a computer, will empower students who are shy or lack social skills to interact more openly than they normally would feel comfortable doing.
Distance Education also provides endless opportunities for self-expression. Students are encouraged to interact openly and find their voice. Techniques can be practiced and improved on with each on-line class exercise.
Another very important aspect of DE is the exploitation of time. When students are not restricted to hours of classroom time a week, they can work at their own pace. This encourages individual responsibility and often improves work. Many students need time to think, research and reflect on their ideas before putting them to paper (or computer). The open community of DE allows for this need.

DOUBT:
The future of college classrooms is steadily moving towards Distance Education/E-pedagogy. Is this good? Bad? How does it affect the students of tomorrow? I think, overall, they will not benefit from DE, but rather it will hinder them by not meeting the classroom needs they have come to expect. By moving a classroom online, social interaction is taken away. Although students can chat online, the face-to-face interaction and human contact they have come to rely on is taken away. This is most troublesome from the teaching aspect. If students are working online with minimal classroom time, an instructor cannot gage the attitudes, emotional states or understanding levels of their students. It is not as if instructors desire this decrease in interaction, but once it occurs, empathy levels tend to decrease. The impersonality of the internet has been a problem since its beginning. Formality is taken away when the writing environment is a blank screen and immediate consequences of improper correspondence are nonexistent or slow in coming. This informality bleeds into the students work and interactions as the semester progresses, hindering the students ability to interact effectively and appropriately.
Another major concern when face-to-face interaction is taken away is the progressive learning ability. Many students NEED someone there, at all times, to guide them through the learning process. They need, in a sense, someone to hold their hand. Now, this is in no way a good thing, and at some point, the student will have to learn to let go, but what about in the beginning. By introducing them to an online community, with little instructor interaction, and tell them to "just go for it," it is basically like pushing them off a dock and seeing if they sink or swim. Is this really how we, as educators, want to teach the students of the future?