Teaching Philosophy:

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, "[T]he sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them." This sacrifice is one that each of our students is making. The way that students learn to use language is the cornerstone of their success in all disciplines; it is for this reason, after all, that composition is a prerequisite. Their success in this facet of their leaning is my job, my contribution toward this sacrifice. To expose students to the richness of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, to show them how to get close to a text, is one of the most exciting parts of my job. When I can lead students to see the power and purpose their writing can have and help them to see how they can best utilize that power and that purpose, then we have done our job in our classroom community.