Teaching Philosophy Statement

I've hit my first major wall on the dissertation. I've been reading everyday and doing a little writing (paragraphs at a time), but I have not been able to make the headway I've wanted to on Chapter Two. I'm giving myself one more week to get this thing out of my system.

In the meantime, I've done my best to stay productive in other ways. I am working on the nineteenth century piece, and I realized that it may be more suited for a history journal than the major communication outlet I was thinking about. Of course an added bonus is that I can keep it in Chicago if I send it to history and I have less work to do on the revisions--its a very strong (I think) archival piece--so I WILL send that out by Friday.

Last night I started work on my teaching portfolio. I have completely trashed my old philosophy statement--it was clearly written to fulfill some assignment because it has very little of my personality in it at all. So I went through all of my old emails that I have saved from students who write me at the end of the semester to say how much they enjoyed the class. It was heartwarming and almost made me miss teaching (that feeling quickly passed--I'm enjoying the fact that I don't have to copy syllabi in a couple weeks). I found some common themes in the emails--my classroom environment is one that is seen as being comfortable for such a high anxiety course (public speaking), my organization/preparation, and my attitude/enthusiasm. As a result, I'm thinking about organizing my teaching philosophy statement around these themes--trying to come up with some good alliteration or something. Right now I'm thinking of "P" words (I don't know why that letter came to mind first)--planning, preparation, performance, passion, peer-support/evaluation--I don't know--still in inventional stages on this one, but I'm feeling good about this direction.

I would love to say that I'm going to write, write, write, today, but let's be real. I will be proud if I can get through these paragraphs on Maria Stewart and Phillis Wheatley--that would be fabulous progress for today. We'll see...