Passionate About Teaching

Ending Statement Feminist and Critical Pedagogies

I came back to graduate school last semester at the ripe-old age of 31, unsure of what I wanted to get out of it. I had spent a year in graduate studies in English at the University of Maine about six years earlier, but left because I wasn't ready to commit to an academic life. In the six years since I left Maine, my life had been anything but academic. For the first year or so, I "temped" at conventions and tradeshows, went on auditions and performed in regional theater. Then a friend of mine introduced me to her acting teacher, and I got involved in a two-year intensive acting program which forced me to look at myself and my life deeply (and luckily got me into therapy)! During that time I began a temp job at a small executive search firm where a few acting friends also worked. The job turned permanent and lasted over three years while I finished my acting program and began auditioning. Looking back now, I guess the problem was, once I finished class, I wasn't the same person who had originally gone out on auditions. I found myself reading books on writing (never acting) on my lunch breaks from the stifling office secretarial job. But people who asked about my life heard about my auditions and singing classes and wish to be on Broadway. I never looked at the fact that that wish was a very old, childhood wish which had slowly stopped giving me what it had for so long: something to dream about, aspire to. Something, I now admit, to make me interesting.

The decision to leave it behind was painful (no one outside of "the business" could understand why I would want to leave behind such a glorious, exciting dream. Interestingly, all of my friends who were at various levels of s...

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...at at least I now know that I need to teach--in some format, somewhere, and I need to apply what I've learned and continue to learn and question my own learning. But I can't decide if going on for a PhD is really what I want anymore. I always thought that was the mark of success. But I wonder if it will really allow me to work with the students I am most interested in helping. I am particularly interested in working with those who didn't get enough out of school but who decided to come back and give it another try, to see if they'd find something different this time around. I want to provide something different. I know I want to keep teaching and talking about teaching. I know I want to keep the hope that teaching writing is valuable and opens up possibilities for students who maybe thought they had none. Is that too naive? Maybe. But it seems like it's worth a try.