Secrets of an English Teacher

As tweeting and texting reduce the art of writing to 140-word mind-burps, as political debate is reduced to cries of “Socialist!” or “Fascist!”, and as incorrect apostrophes become as plaguey as locusts, I am moved to rise from my rocking chair and take up arms.

Well, actually I don’t have a rocking chair, and, even though I’m writing this in Arizona, I don’t own a gun. But though my eyes are dim and my gait is slow (or vice versa), I am moved to share my lifelong passion for English. Old teachers never die, they just keep lecturing.

When I first walked into an English classroom in September of 1976, kids wrote essays on lined paper and passed notes from desk to desk. When I last walked out of an English classroom in June of 2007, kids e-mailed essays as Word attachments and slyly texted under the desk. Though technology changed, the subject matter didn’t. During those three decades, I tried, 5 times a day, 182 days a year, to show kids what was great about Shakespeare, and to convince them that effective writing mattered. At the beginning I lectured a lot, corrected with a red pen, and shared the Bard on a Wurlitzer cassette player. By the end, kids mostly worked in small groups, I used Word’s Track Changes feature to correct, and I shared the Bard with a DVD player and large-screen TV. Throughout, the kids’ responses were the same: “Why do we have to learn this?” “This is boring!” “Is this going to be on the test?”

But we teachers are Don Quixotes, believing that even the most determined Aldonzas can be Dulcineas, sharing our impossible dream with passion that causes our students to cry, “Man, you’re weird!” I continue to teach college-level Freshman Composition and Developmental Writing, both in the classroom and online, and now I’m using this site to evangelize. Because I’m fragmented, I’ve divided the site into categories:

Secrets of My School Days. My memories of public school in the not-so-good-old days of the 1950s and 1960s

Secrets of my Classroom. Tales comic and tragic from my teaching years.

Secrets of English. Literary ephemera, linguistic tidbits, secrets of writing, grammar and usage, and other fun stuff about the language.

Secrets of the Battlefield. News and rants about what’s happening in education.

If you hate compartmentalizing your life, just click on the POSTS page and you can read my entries as they fly from my fevered mind!

I hope you enjoy these “lessons,” and that you’ll share your responses and your own experiences. So welcome, whether you’re a student, a teacher, a parent, or someone who stumbled on this site while searching for Victoria’s Secret.