back 2 school
Last week, I started my sixteenth semester of teaching college-level writing. I think typing out that sentence actually made me have a small heart attack. Sometimes I feel like I'm still a brand new teacher. Part of that is because I have always been learning as I go: I taught my first class in the first year of my Master's program, which I entered straight into from my undergrad degree. There was no "real world experience" that prepared me for teaching that class. We got a week-long orientation before teaching, and then that first semester we got a Composition Pedagogy course. It was truly out of the frying pan and into the fire. Since then, I got one more pedagogy class in my Doctoral program. I didn't have the comprehensive pedagogy education that K-12 teachers have, so there's always an element of feeling like there's SO much I don't know about teaching. I think the bigger reason why I still feel like a newbie is the fact that the context for te...