An exercise

Mid-March, 2013

The other evening I submitted my application for a tenured position at Clark. It will likely go to the shredder based on my relative lack of experience teaching adults at the community college level. So, not getting my hopes up.

It was an excellent exercise, however, in getting a bit closer to what I believe of myself as a teacher, or what perhaps I think I should believe of my self. For instance, I mention under the question about my philosophy of teaching that I try to focus on Stephen Krashen's idea of "i+1" under his theory of language acquisition that basically say a student doesn't "learn" a language so much as he or she gradually produces more of it over time and exposure, or "input." A teacher introduces material at the critical moment in which a student shows a certain mastery, thereby expressing a "readiness" for new material. The new material is just beyond the student's current capability; and this, my own thought here, can cultivate a certain ambition to succeed. I say "can" because without being sensitive to the student's "readiness" or stability in the prior material, "+1" can just as easily become "-1". That is to say, an L-2 learner who has not yet mastered the full range of, say, an adjective clause may only flounder when challenged to produce participial phrase. In order for the spark of a language concept to ignite authentic production, there need to be fuel and the proper conditions. It is the cultivation that matters: the careful blend of tinder and oxygen that every new fire needs.

So, one point I did not touch on in the description of my teaching philosophy was the blunt fact that I teach what I need to learn. Or rather, if I were to apply the above, I teach what I pursue. And what is it I pursue? No surprises here: to make sense ouf things, let things reveal themselves to me so that I might capture them in a few choice words, and to leave these words lingering for someone else to ponder and develop. And I suppose this is what I teach: read, write, contribute.

And this gets even closer to what I pursue. If I am to be engaging in these paths, then I am also to be focusing on giving, serving the community to which I belong. The community to which I belong. What is that, anyway? A fascinating question because I've been struggling with it my whole life. More on this later, I suspect.