Writers in Conversation

On Thursday February 15, I went to Professors Weldon and Faldet's reading, Writers in Conversation. They both had very good presenting style, making eye contact with the audience and explaining before had a little about what went into the writing of the different pieces and the styles that they used. Both of them were good about keeping the audience engaged, through humor and use of tone and storytelling type characterization, which is very important when reading aloud. The stories that they read, weren't humorous, however, but the humor that they used served as a counter balance to the serious or sad parts. Professor Faldet also used a framing device - in this case the image of the door - to start and end the story, bringing the listeners full circle, connecting where she ended up with where she started.
How does this relate to teaching? One thing that I liked that Professor Weldon mentioned was that for her Creative Writing class, she does the assignments along with the students. I think that this is a good thing to keep in mind for teaching. Whether it is in math or science or English, doing the assignments or warm-up problems or experiments along with the students is a good way to lead by example. If one were to do this, and it wouldn't have to be all the time because no one has time for that, then when the students struggle it would be easier to see where they went wrong and you would be able to relate with the student's problem. Of course being able to keep your audiences attention is also very important. You want what you are teaching to be relevant to the students and to keep them interested in what is going on. The framing device is another thing that can apply to all aspects of teaching. You want to make sure that the students are able to see how they got from the initial step to the final result. A review at the end of a lesson is important so that the students tie off that subject before moving to a new one. I think this reading had a lot to offer in regards to ideas for classroom teaching, and it was also very enjoyable to listen to a couple of Luther's professors share what they have been working on.