The most important thing to me in teaching is the relationship created between the people in the classroom. As a teacher, one of my perpetual goals is to enjoy my students. I know that sounds antithetical to the old "don't let them see you smile until November" mentality, but it seems to me that "productive habits of mind" necessitates an atmosphere that encourages lively discussion and the sharing of ideas. I believe inductive learning is seminal to self-discovery and articulate communication, and I deeply value the continual exploration and refinement of each person's sense of emotion, ethics, and logic. With the increasingly assertive need for test-taking and quantitative results, I believe that there is ample room in the English (and Humanities') classroom for invitation to the dialogue that the arts and culture offer. My goal is to create a classroom where the mind and heart dominate the specters of percentages and integers.

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