Teachers often have areas of their subject in which they specialize, either because they have inadvertently become experts of that particular area, because they are talented in that particular area, or because they have a strong preference for one or another area of their subject. For example, I’m good friends with a social studies teacher who can teach history backwards and forwards without much struggle to make the possibly boring quite interesting, but struggled initially by his own admission to make economics interesting and engaging for students in his class.
If I had to guess what will eventually become my area of expertise, I would base my guess on what I prefer to teach, prefer most to grade, and hear the most complaints about in my classroom: writing, and particularly the writing of essays. I love assigning them, I love discussing them with my students, and I can almost come close to liking the evaluation of the writing my students submit. This likely makes me a weird teacher, as well as the antithesis of what you think of when you think of the English teacher; the stereotype is that we’re grammar Nazis and begrudgingly assign essays because we think we should and then labor in grading every detail on a schedule that resembles a stack per World Cup. But, more than reading, and more than verbal arguing--which is saying something if you know me--the essay is the thing I most look forward to assigning and working alongside my students as they complete their work.
It is not accidental that this realization came to me as I worked down the hall from Marsha McFall. When I came to the school where I currently teach, my then-fiance (and--spoiler alert--now wife and mother of our expected daughter) was the only person I knew, but she set me up with the rundown of the department I was joining. Marsha’s name came up as a somewhat-motherly genius of writing instruction. Eventually, I began slipping in through the cracked door of her classroom--which was always more open than it appeared--to learn what I could from her. I eventually stole rubrics, entire teaching units, and nuggets of what experts would call “pedagogy” that would revolutionize my writing instruction. The rubric that she sent me made grading essays quicker and feedback easier to give. The idea that students could use the rubric to craft revisions or discuss what worked and what didn’t in their essay was made much clearer with the rubric that she gave me. I adapted it to every single essay I ever assigned until the Common Core was adopted by our county.
In addition to the rubric, how essay topics are written in my classroom is completely taken from Marsha’s handouts. The ways in which she invites students to write about the literature they are reading and the different kinds of thinking required of her students inspired me to examine the kinds of topics I was writing and the type of discussions I was having with my students.
I owe everything that I understand about the importance of relationships in the classroom to my wife, who is herself a gifted English teacher of serious magnitude. But I owe everything I enjoy about the seemingly more difficult aspect of teaching English--the writing assignments and grading thereof--to Marsha McFall. People continually said today that she’s going to be missed in the building next year because she’s retiring, but for me she’ll be in my classroom every time I sooth a student’s anxiety about writing an essay, and called to mind every time I get a student who thanks me for making them a better writer (the number, officially, is 2 thus far).
If I had to guess what will eventually become my area of expertise, I would base my guess on what I prefer to teach, prefer most to grade, and hear the most complaints about in my classroom: writing, and particularly the writing of essays. I love assigning them, I love discussing them with my students, and I can almost come close to liking the evaluation of the writing my students submit. This likely makes me a weird teacher, as well as the antithesis of what you think of when you think of the English teacher; the stereotype is that we’re grammar Nazis and begrudgingly assign essays because we think we should and then labor in grading every detail on a schedule that resembles a stack per World Cup. But, more than reading, and more than verbal arguing--which is saying something if you know me--the essay is the thing I most look forward to assigning and working alongside my students as they complete their work.
It is not accidental that this realization came to me as I worked down the hall from Marsha McFall. When I came to the school where I currently teach, my then-fiance (and--spoiler alert--now wife and mother of our expected daughter) was the only person I knew, but she set me up with the rundown of the department I was joining. Marsha’s name came up as a somewhat-motherly genius of writing instruction. Eventually, I began slipping in through the cracked door of her classroom--which was always more open than it appeared--to learn what I could from her. I eventually stole rubrics, entire teaching units, and nuggets of what experts would call “pedagogy” that would revolutionize my writing instruction. The rubric that she sent me made grading essays quicker and feedback easier to give. The idea that students could use the rubric to craft revisions or discuss what worked and what didn’t in their essay was made much clearer with the rubric that she gave me. I adapted it to every single essay I ever assigned until the Common Core was adopted by our county.
In addition to the rubric, how essay topics are written in my classroom is completely taken from Marsha’s handouts. The ways in which she invites students to write about the literature they are reading and the different kinds of thinking required of her students inspired me to examine the kinds of topics I was writing and the type of discussions I was having with my students.
I owe everything that I understand about the importance of relationships in the classroom to my wife, who is herself a gifted English teacher of serious magnitude. But I owe everything I enjoy about the seemingly more difficult aspect of teaching English--the writing assignments and grading thereof--to Marsha McFall. People continually said today that she’s going to be missed in the building next year because she’s retiring, but for me she’ll be in my classroom every time I sooth a student’s anxiety about writing an essay, and called to mind every time I get a student who thanks me for making them a better writer (the number, officially, is 2 thus far).