When I embarked upon this career path in 2004 with an intensive TESOL training program at Columbia University, I was exposed to many teaching techniques, lesson plan ideas, and guiding principles of pedagogy. However, it wasn’t until I found myself before the blackboard, facing my students and drenched in sweat, that I discovered what it meant to teach. As every student soon learns, being exposed to knowledge is not the same as internalizing it, and receiving instruction is not the same thing as learning. Teaching, when done well, is the art of sparking in students the desire to learn. For me, this means cultivating a student-centered approach to learning, where the students take responsibility for their own intellectual growth, discovering their interests, talents, and passions in the process.

A student-centered approach requires that the instructor maximize opportunities for students to learn from course material, while responding creatively to classroom challenges. Students themselves often provide answers to problems that arise, but only if the instructor allows and encourages the process. Practically, this means creating student-driven classroom activities, including group work, guided peer review of student writing, group projects, and collective problem-solving on the part of the students. I first developed these techniques teaching ESL to college students from 2004 to 2019, and have refined and elaborated on them in teaching Composition, World Humanities, and Creative Writing at both City College and City Tech.

While the extent to which I am responsible for curriculum content varies class by class, I am certainly always responsible for how content is presented to the students. Specifically, I always try to assign readings with practical follow-up activities involved, or particular questions for students to consider while reading, so that reading is an active, rather than a passive activity. My approach to student questions about curriculum content is to encourage such questions in class, letting them inform the direction of class discussions and future assignments. I have often added readings to the syllabus based on student questions and feedback.

In writing instruction, I continually refresh curricula and assigned readings to expose students to the widest possible variety of writing genres and from as diverse a selection of authors as possible. I often pair readings with audiovisual and digital content to broaden and deepen discussion, and provide more points of entry for students with different learning styles and life experiences. I find this approach succeeds in sparking creativity and interest in the students, and inspires them to write in a variety of genres themselves, to discover the purpose behind writing forms and styles, and to take more risks on the page.

My students are primarily first-generation Americans from immigrant households, many of them the first in their families to attend college. Each has something valuable to offer the class, and to this end, I strive to help students make connections between their own lives and the themes and voices represented in course content. This often leads to great leaps in writing skills development, even in the course of a single semester. I have helped students find and develop their writing voices once they discover writers such as Junot Díaz, Chang-Rae Lee, and Mohsin Hamid. I have also discovered that the many of the same students who embrace the writing of James Baldwin can appreciate Jane Austen and Homer. There are many keys to opening a student’s intellectual curiosity, and there is no better way to find out just how many than to spend years teaching in culturally diverse classrooms. Overall, my grounding wire is to maintain a sense of humility, respect for student contributions, and a belief in each student’s ability to rise to a challenge.