As an instructor, one of the things that I’m doing differently this year is to tell more stories. I’ve worked at a number of different places including Verizon and Southern Methodist University. However, I’ve also worked for a car dealership, the State Attorney’s Office in Clearwater, Florida, a bank, and a distribution company. In high school, I also worked for a restaurant and a law firm. I’ve hesitated to tell stories from all of these different jobs because I didn’t want to appear flaky, or old, or whatever, because I didn’t go directly from HS to BA to MA. And, well, I’ve had some people think I was 28 so I wanted to hold on to that bit of fantasy until the last possible moment!

I started thinking about my classroom presence this summer when I listened to one of Ellen’s talks. In the talk, Ellen told a story about how she was talking to a friend and congregation member and said that she was hesitatant to use an example from her own life on a particular issue she was discussing in her talk because she knew she didn’t consider herself a role model on this issue to the congregation. Her friend said (and imagine the Oklahoma southern drawl), “you think we won’t know if you don’t tell us?” :) So, I thought about my own case and decided that students are pretty smart and they’re going to be able to figure out whether I have the qualifications to teach the course and offer relevant real life examples.

I think my classroom presence is much better because of the change that I’ve made. I think I’m more of who I am. I also think telling stories from my past reinforces that I’ve got a valid reason or example to illustrate what we’re talking about in class.

In other news…

I’m really excited about the expert project assignment I’m using in my professional writing class. After going to the Computers & Writing Conference this summer at Texas Tech and listening to Amy Hanson’s talk, “Blogging: The Newest Form of Professional Communication?”, I decided to change the way I was asking students to blog for class. This summer I did an initial run of the assignment and it seemed to work pretty well in the summer session course. For the assignment, students are required to create a professional blog on a subject of their choosing. Their goal is to become an “expert” on this subject by the end of the semester. I have the expert project assignment sheet posted on the course blog if you’d like to take a peek. Further, the research that they do on this expert project can feed into the other writing assignments that they do over the course of the semester.

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