English Educator Fine Artist Columnist Pushcart Nominee Freelance: Editing/Writing/Tutoring/Photography
ESSAYS POETRY
Teaching Award Application Essay Teaching is about relationship. It is about stakeholders’ mutual respect and team effort. Teaching entails the heart, its passion for caring and nurturing and learning. Teachers uplift while encouraging risk. Teachers prepare and keep relevant their lessons. Teachers are both creative and compliant, patient and willing to listen. They are advisors and mentors, volunteers and dedicated leaders and followers. Teachers are supportive, hard working, ever seeking lessons in the world about them. Teachers sacrifice time unpaid to further students’ needs for assessment and to support students’ extracurricular lives. Teaching, like virtue, is its own reward because we learn best by doing what is best for ourselves and others and pay the merits forward by continuously doing so. Teachers are both collaborative and solo fliers. They are performers, facilitators, stage managers, and audiences to countless trials, errors, and successes of colleagues and students alike. Each return from students, whether in class, in the community, or as alums in visits, phone calls, and other correspondence affirms education’s cycle of learning and success. . . . Teaching reveals and teachers heal. Teachers are pioneers and governors. Teaching is imparting and/or honing skills. The object of teaching is education, the leading out of uncertainty into self-fulfillment, continued courage, and commitment to sharing talents and discoveries. My belief in relationship affects how I greet every newly met class with a focus on trust and integrity, shared vulnerability and mutual contribution—a combined effort for everyone’s understanding and eventual success. I encourage discussion and audience. I pose questions and promote argument. . . . My sense of humor often revolves around wordplay, and I demonstrate this fondness with students to encourage development of their language appreciation. I hope my spontaneity, goading, and improvisational bursts challenge students to think on their feet and for themselves. . . . I am a life-long learner, and I hope to instill that same sense of wonder, curiosity, pursuit, and dedication to self and community advancement into my students. I hope that my love for language is contagious and its only cure seems to lie in feeding its incessant, insatiable hunger. |
A Killer Poem I want to be a poem hung in a pouch awaiting David’s hand to heft me, be swung in a sling, given wings, flung to some Philistine’s face, cracking cranium, breaking brow, creating chasm wide enough to ponder the power of pebble launched in prayer, mumbled verse, ancient mantra turning toy to weapon, sacred chant transforming boy to man: stone palm string psalm sting bone. |