Tiny Teaching Stories: About the Course

nancy_sommers
Author
Author
0 0 395

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Eileen Curran-Kondrad, Teaching Lecturer, English, at Plymouth State University. Eileen has written her story as a poem.

 

About the Course

 

No birdies, no eagles

no long drives

I slink off the course

after the ninth

 

On the terrace

outside the clubhouse

college tournament players

mill around.

I browse the tables

brimming

with golf swag.

 

A voice calls out

a young man approaches.

Remember me?

I took your class last year.

We read five books that semester.

You turned me into a reader.

I went on to read

 David Copperfield.

I just had to tell you.

 

I roll my clubs to the car

chuckle to myself.

Did I just get a hole in one?

 

Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines.

About the Author
Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed writing programs for more than thirty years, now teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers” and “Responding to Student Writing” are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition. She has also created three films—Shaped by Writing, Across the Drafts, and Beyond the Red Ink—to bring the voices of student writers into a larger discussion about writing instruction. Nancy Sommers is currently the coauthor of Diana Hacker’s best-selling handbooks: The Bedford Handbook, A Writer’s Reference, Rules for Writers, A Pocket Style Manual, and Writer’s Help (see hackerhandbooks.com). Her newest instructor resource, Responding to Student Writers, offers a model for thinking about response as a dialogue between students and teachers.