Tag Archives: teaching

Interests of Old by Fred Wilbur

Photo of collection of antique kitchen items
 

My teacher wife says that one learns by teaching. Of course, a good teacher must have mastery over the material to be taught. Another step of this ‘how-to’ of teaching is in preparing the method of communicating the material to the student(s). Process is a large part of teaching, or any craft for that matter.  Better teachers are those whose process is engaging, even compelling, regardless of the challenging part. And a good teacher learns what accomplishes this engagement, what interests the students, how they learn. Unfortunately, the public-school curriculum is now dictated by state … Continue reading Interests of Old by Fred Wilbur

A Place to Hold Us by Sharon Perkins Ackerman

large brick turret against blue sky
 

I ready myself to read poetry for a group of graduate students. They’ve had the ingenuity to find an old, abandoned chapel near campus and turn it into a poetry space. Eavesdropping from a pew, I find myself listening once again to choruses of before; before the first published book, before marriages and mortgages and self-support. There are lots of munchies—I’ve forgotten how hungry students are, how irregular the meals. There are students reading poems from phones rather than spiral notebooks, whose edges might as well be the coiling of years between us. There is … Continue reading A Place to Hold Us by Sharon Perkins Ackerman

Bring Them to an Art Show: On Teaching Imaginative Writing by Rich H. Kenney, Jr.

White horse head morpihing into flowers
 

If a piece of artwork could express itself in words, what would it say? This was the question I pondered while visiting Time Lapse, an art faculty show at Chadron State College (CSC) in Chadron, Nebraska several semesters ago. Here’s the beginning of what Black and White Crease, a painting by adjunct faculty member, DeWayne Gimeson, seemed to say to me: I believe in creases like the ones that form on balls of paper we too often throw away. We rarely see their peaks, their crevices, their unscripted shadows save for the quiet exhale—the curious … Continue reading Bring Them to an Art Show: On Teaching Imaginative Writing by Rich H. Kenney, Jr.