Teaching Philosophy

When I signed up to live and teach in China for two years, I was excited to experience life in a culture unlike my own. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was not unacquainted with ethnic and cultural differences—indeed, my grade school had twenty-six different ethnic groups enrolled in it—but I myself had never been singled out as unusual or strange. In China, I was to be constantly reminded of my difference. Although I lived on the outskirts of Beijing--a place where I assumed people would be familiar with foreigners--in fact, in the early 90s few foreigners had ever been, let alone lived, in the Western Hills district. Sometimes the attention I received in my neighborhood was pleasant; people smiled and were eager to talk with me. Other times it was less so; people would stare and point without the least bit of self-consciousness. Once I remember being pinched hard on the cheek by an old woman who thought I was a ghost. The red mark she left on my cheek proved otherwise.

China has been instrumental in shaping the way I teach. My main focus as a teacher is to train students in literature and writing in a manner that stresses difference. That is to say, I want to make students aware of the world views and cultural values that underlie a given text, and to realize, in turn, the factors and choices that have gone into shaping their own language, writing, world views, and values. I believe that it is only by becoming aware of these differences--and by cultivating a lively respect for them--that students can make informed choices about the personal and societal ideals they themselves choose to hold.

There are several ways I translate this goal into my day-to-day teaching. For one, I employ a seminar-style approach in my classes, encouraging the students to interact directly with one another. I emphasize that everyone has something important to say, and that everyone, including me, is both a student and a teacher. To this effect, I ask students when they walk in the door to take intellectual risks and raise questions they fear might be considered “stupid.” In short, what I ask is that they let go of judgment both of themselves and of others. This is a critical element of my teaching: to appreciate difference in both literature and the world outside the classroom, it is necessary to appreciate difference within the classroom.

Another way I teach diversity and difference is through close reading. I believe this skill lies at the heart of the teaching of English. Sometimes, students read carelessly, attributing ideas to authors that are simply not in the text. By showing students how to analyze sentence structure, word choice, and literary devices, I push them to see how they derive meaning from a written work and to understand where it is both appropriate and inappropriate to draw their own conclusions. I often tell students it is like bending their ears down to the text and listening carefully to what it has to “say.” Reading in this way is a profound act of respect, even love; it forces students to acknowledge a mind and presence often totally foreign to their own, one with a set of values and ideas correspondingly different.

Response writing is yet another technique I use in my classes, both to help students with their writing (I liken writing to a muscle that needs to be built up through frequent practice) and to promote a respect for difference. In my seminars, I assign one or two online questions or prompts for the students to answer every week. Students are required to read at least the two responses posted ahead of theirs on the discussion board, then honestly and respectfully react to these responses when composing their own. Providing an alternate place for students to engage in dialogue is important because students from diverse cultural backgrounds and with diverse communication styles have exactly the same amount of space on the website in which to express themselves. Moreover, online discussions give every student a chance to share thoughts directly with classmates because the environment is not teacher-directed. In this way, students can develop a more personal relationship with the literature they are reading and form their own positions on it more easily.

Seminar-style teaching, close reading, and response writing are only a few of the techniques I employ in order to cultivate an environment where ideas, values, and opinions can be openly expressed and explored. Above all, it is my hope that students will take away from my classes a joy in learning and an ongoing willingness to engage in dialogue--to embrace the world in all its vastness, complexity, paradox, and mystery.