Tomorrow we're planning on eating the following:

turkey, which is brining overnight

mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, and rosemary (cooked this evening ahead of time)

carrot soufflé, which I prepped tonight and will bake tomorrow

chicken and sausage gumbo with rice, which Jonathan made yesterday

fried okra (using okra left over after making the gumbo)

collards

and for dessert, three kinds of cookies:

lactation cookies, not because I need the milk supply yet -- just because they're yummy.

praline cookies: a little something I came up with. Pillsbury cut'n'bake sugar cookie dough + praline pecans on top.

and snickerdoodles our neighbor gave us.

(I'm still trying to decide on one more side dish: corn roasted grits. I'll probably end up making it, though.)

The following remarks constitute my personal opinion about what a teaching portfolio, a.k.a. “evidence of excellence in teaching,” should look like and contain. Not everyone may agree with me, but I have seen a lot of teaching portfolios, not only in my training of new teachers as part of my role as Director of First-Year Writing, but also as the chair of a hiring committee.

Questions to Answer

A reader should have the answers to these three basic questions after reading your teaching portfolio. Ideally, they'll be addressed toward the beginning:

1.How long has this person been teaching?
2.How many (and which) courses has this person taught?
3.How many (and what kinds of) student populations has this person taught?

You can provide an “Overview” page that answers these questions. Your curriculum vita should have a “Teaching Experience” section, and you can use that if you like. You can expand that section slightly to give a short blurb about each course. I first put a page like that in my teaching portfolio after one of my professors suggested it to me when I griped to her that the curriculum in our department was so rigid that my teaching materials didn't represent my ideas about designing writing assignments, etc. Those blurbs were a way for me to explain a bit about the departmental curriculum for each course.

Materials in a Teaching Portfolio

A teaching portfolio may contain some or all of these materials:

Teaching philosophy statement
Sample syllabi
Assignment handouts
Student evaluations
Teaching observation reports
DVD of a class meeting
Student work with teacher comments
Statement about how your research is connected to your teaching
List of courses you have planned and would like to teach in the future (a "Courses in Development) page

Your portfolio certainly DOES NOT have to have all of these. In fact, the only item on this list that is de rigueur is the teaching philosophy statement.

The Teaching Philosophy Statement

When I read a teaching philosophy statement, I want to get answers to these two questions:

1.What specific skill, more than any other, do you want students to get out of your class? For writing classes, what kind of writing do you think it's most important for students to know how to do? For literature courses, what kind of reading or literary analysis do you want them to be able to do by semester's end? Of course we want students to enjoy writing and to appreciate literature. For a teaching philosophy statement, though, saying that is a little too easy and obvious. I'm interested in seeing something more thoughtful and specific.

2.How do you teach the skill or content you most want students to learn? This part needs to be a detailed description of an assignment you give students or a classroom activity you do with students. If it works best to use an anecdote about a particular student to illustrate your philosophy in practice, give the anecdote with the student's identifiers changed.

I know I said two questions, but if your primary research area is rhetoric and composition, I expect to see an answer to one more question: with what rhetorical or pedagogical theorists do you align your teaching practice? In other words, situate your teaching in the field of rhetoric and composition studies.

Alignment and Consistency

I want to see a certain coherence throughout the portfolio. Let's say you have a portfolio containing the following:

Assignment handout for an annotated bibliography
Assignment handout for a rhetorical analysis paper
Two sample student papers, both personal narratives that got grades of A

It would be more coherent to provide an assignment handout followed immediately by a student's response to that same assignment. Then, if you include two papers, include two papers that got different grades, to be sure the reader sees that you recognize a range of achievement, and to see how you comment on stronger and weaker papers. It doesn't have to be a pair of opposites (A paper, F paper); A paper/B paper or B paper/C paper pairings are fine.

Also related to alignment and consistency: be mindful of contradictions between what you say in your teaching philosophy statement and/or assignment handouts and what you say to students in your comments on their work (or in class, if you provide a DVD of a class meeting). Let's say that in your teaching philosophy statement, you say that what you most want students to learn is the importance of writing for an audience: being aware of the audience's diversity in both their backgrounds and their opinions about the subject of the paper. If you don't say anything about audience in your assignment handouts, and if your comments on student work are along the lines of “no first person,” “no contractions,” “incorrect MLA format,” you lack that alignment and consistency. If audience is your priority, I'd expect to see some remarks about audience in your assignment handouts and comments on papers such as: “you may alienate your audience due to the use of the term ____ here” or “you need to address opposing views X, Y, and Z because not everyone in your audience agrees with your position on this issue,” and so on.

A side note regarding comments on papers: again, this is just my opinion, like everything else here, but when I look at sample student work with teacher comments, what I do first is look ONLY at the comments without reading the student's writing. If I can't tell from the teacher's comments what the subject matter of the paper is, I find the comments to be insufficient. I do this in my own teaching too before I return a set of papers. If I see that I haven't made comments on, asked questions about, or otherwise engaged the subject of the paper in some way, I write more comments.

Other Advice

Keep the portfolio brief. Don't load it up with years' worth of teaching evaluations, multiple student papers, syllabi and assignment sheets for every class you've ever taught. Be very selective when it comes to deciding what to include. The portfolio should represent the best of your teaching. That said, if you include a set of comments from your student evaluations, don't cherry-pick them. Include comments from all the students in the class who wrote them, even if some of the comments are critical.

Earlier I mentioned a “Courses in Development” page, which you can put in your portfolio. I recommend having a page like this especially if you are a graduate student without teaching experience besides first-year writing. That page is an opportunity for you to show hiring committees that you have thought about and planned for teaching a variety of courses and are prepared to do so. You don't need to have complete syllabi for these classes, only course descriptions of about a paragraph each with reading lists and brief descriptions of assignments. It's also good to mention the level of each course you're planning. Is it a sophomore-level course? Graduate-level? A class for juniors and seniors?

• I really will be rebooting the blog soon. It will be a New Year's resolution; I've had a lot of success with those in the past.
• Today at church, one of Henry's Sunday School teachers told me that during their little birthday party (for Jesus), they'd given the children gingerbread cookies. Henry took his over to the nativity scene and put it in the manger. I relay this anecdote simply because it is SUCH a Henry thing to do. He is ALWAYS stashing food in little cups and boxes, even shoes. It's cute, but yeesh.
• I'm almost finished with my syllabus for next semester. I'm teaching English 501, a.k.a. the T.A./pedagogy course. The last time I taught it, I had a pretty good setup going; each week we'd focus on one particular approach: process/post-process, cognitive theory, critical pedagogy, collaborative learning, etc. But now I've switched books; before, I used Cross-Talk and the Guide. Now I'm using only the Norton. I love the other books, but we decided to make the Norton a central text for our comprehensive exam reading list for rhetoric and composition, and I like for my 501 course to be not only a good preparatory course for teaching writing but also a solid survey that will prepare students (who choose to major or minor in rhet-comp) for our exam. The challenge, then, has been twofold: first, I want to keep a similar organization in which we focus each week on a certain type of pedagogy, which -- while still doable -- is not quite as easy with the new book. I think the weekly theme was helpful for the students, and I got a pretty positive response to my syllabus on the Writing Program Administrators listserv. Second, of course, is the fact that I'm due to give birth on March 26, so I'll have to compress a lot of material into not as much time. I've decided to devote the last few weeks of the class to field work; students will go and observe meetings of writing classes and keep a journal about the experience. I feel strongly that observations need to be a part of this course, as most students have not taught before, and this semester it makes sense to have the observations in the last few weeks.
• On a somewhat related note, I have a confession to make. I have now been teaching writing and studying composition theory for just over ten years. Over the years, I have come to realize that I have no strong opinion one way or another about How Writing Should Be Taught. I honestly think that students can learn useful skills in an expressivist course, a rhetoric-heavy course, a writing-about-literature course, a current-traditional course, a cultural studies based course, etc. I can't decide if this makes me a terrible writing program administrator or an excellent one.
• Wait, I'm going to be having a baby girl in three months? SRSLY? I feel so unprepared, even though we have everything we need and more. So much is a wild card, though: will her crying interfere with Henry's sleep? Will he be extremely jealous? How will she sleep? Will she be breech like her brother? Will I have to have another c-section? WHO KNOWS...

I've been doing a lot of class observations lately in fulfillment of my role as Director of First-Year Writing. As I sit in the back of the classroom for these observations, I decided to collect the epigrammatic statements that students write on the backs of desk chairs (line breaks in original):

• I hate school
• Gun Town
• Ballin'
• KΣ
  is the
  SHIT!
• Fuck
  this
  class

From Betty Friedan's Life So Far, p. 161, citing an experience that took place in (circa) 1963:

But I surely wasn't getting much of anywhere, looking for patterns beyond the feminine mystique. I remember after one group interview, when I was lecturing at the University of Oklahoma, the educated women telling me how they were prisoners, forever grading freshman English papers, doomed never to get beyond instructor's pay or title because they were married to the doctor or dentist or lawyer practicing in that town and not about to leave. And when I got back home, there were long-distance calls: "Please don't use what I told you. They'll recognize me. I'm just lucky to have the job at all."

(Reference for the mother-teachers term)

The following is the dream I had last night. Two immediate thoughts: 1.) definitely one of those vivid dreams associated with being in the family way; and 2.) I would totally watch a science fiction movie with this as its premise. Screenwriters, if you want the idea, have at it; see Creative Commons license.

I was in the future – around 2030-2040. I hadn’t aged, though; in fact, I think I was a few years younger and had been brought in from the past. The city I was in looked like it had gone through a disaster of some kind. Houses were partially burned, boarded up, or splintered. Rubble was everywhere. But there were some inhabitable buildings, and I lived in relative comfort.

For entertainment, people salvaged old technology from the 1990s and 2000s and played it, mostly old voice mails found on some cell phone companies' hard drives. People would listen to voice mails left by strangers for other strangers 40-50 years prior.* I listened to a message from someone inviting someone else to go to a Bible study. Another message I heard was from a woman letting someone know she had made "dime chicken," a low-budget but tasty and healthy dish, and that the person was welcome to stop by for dinner.

My job consisted of being sent into old dilapidated houses to take out an installation of equipment called a "Doom Matrix." It was a huge setup of projectors and computer processors, kind of similar in function to the holo-emitters (holodeck) on Star Trek. They had been sold as video game consoles. People had gotten addicted to them, and the machines had become self-aware, destructive, and murderous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

I had, apparently, been summoned to purge the houses of these machines, which had been temporarily disabled by bombs and power shutdowns. They needed people who had a proven and utter lack of interest in playing video games, as I do. Others they had recruited for the job had been too curious about the Doom Matrix and had turned it on just to see what it was like.

* Actually, if voice mail had been available in the 1950s and 60s, I would definitely enjoy listening to old messages. I can imagine "http://oldtimeyvoicemail.blogspot.com" quite easily.

65% of doctors oppose the President's health care plan

or...

63% of doctors support a public option?

The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to be the more reliable source, but then again, we know that the American Medical Association isn't in favor of a public option, or they want to be sure they can opt out of accepting it, at least.

I think people who teach literature courses should do more of it. Jonathan is teaching Jesus' Son in his sophomore literature survey course, and I mentioned to him that maybe I should come and do a short guest appearance in his class, just to get up in front of the students and say, "OMG YOU GUYS, this book is SOOOO GOOOOOOD" and the like. I know he won't do it. The professors I had in college never gushed either. It was always just "okay, for Thursday, read 'Among School Children' and 'The Second Coming.'"

How is it that so many people come to read the Twilight or Harry Potter books? People they know gush about them, and their enthusiasm motivates. Do you teach literature? Do you make a point of showing strong enthusiasm about the works you teach?