All the classes I teach are about the students, not me. What does this mean? Well, instead of asking students to adapt to me, I get a feel for who they are, what they are about, the things they care about, and then I find a way to fuse those likes/dislikes into my course materials. For example, movie reviews can be just as useful as a well crafted argumentative piece. Get students to pick a Simpsons or South Park episode apart and you can accomplish something similar to analyzing a great work of literature. Assignments of this kind encourage students to question what their pop culture is feeding to them, which assists them as encounter all life will throw their way. Hopefully, these skills will spill over into the tools they will need for whichever major they pursue.

Learning should be as fun as it is stimulating.

“The Power of Confession: the Closets of Dorian Gray”
Published in In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism Vol. 14: 1 (2005)

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© Copyright Brad Windhauser 2008. All rights reserved