What am I reading?

Words.  Words.  Words.

But more than an over-quoted line from Hamlet, you’re reading a joint blog by Eric Kennedy and Christine Gill (us) about our experiences as instructors of First Year English at Marquette University.  The blog more specifically recounts our true-to-life interactions with our students, recounting our struggles to better understand how our students participate and what we have tried in class to energize our students to speak up and share.  We have chronicled both our victories and our failures here for you to peruse.

Okay, that sounds like a thing.  Why, then, should I read this thing?

Well, we could go into a used car style sales pitch, but we prefer to be more honest than that.  This blog is here, first and foremost, for us.  It is a way for us to think about how we have been interacting with our students and classes.  But, in doing so, we hope that visitors to this site will be able to take something away from our self-indulgent musings that they can use in their own classrooms.  If you are a fresh, baby faced teacher, a grad student serving as a TA, or someone considering the field of teaching in lieu of lucrative career choices, we hope that you can find something on this site that helps you better understand what to do with those students as you face them in the eye and they face their smartphones instead of responding.

Cheeky.  So you two are like experts or something?

Not in the least!  Excuse us while we chuckle at this.

Okay.  Reposed.

We are not experts by any means.  In fact, we are those fresh, baby faced teachers that we mention in the previous answer.  But, in between episodes of Breaking Bad and Duck Dynasty, we’ve done our homework.  Our Research pages will attest to that.

What you’ll find in the blog is what we have done with our research and ideas in our own, actual, real classes (yes, they let us teach).  Like those in our target demographic, we are stumbling through our first year of teaching and learning a lot along the way.  We have put some of best and worst experiences here for those like us to consider, and those who have been there before to snicker in recognition.

All right, let me see what you have here.

Enjoy.