teaching

About a year and a half ago, I was speaking with one of my professors about graduate school. He was writing me a letter of rec, and he queried why I was just applying to the English grad program and not to Communication (as that was my undergrad degree). I responded off the top of my head (not a safe place to grab stuff from generally) that I didn't want to spend my life performing statistical studies. He seemed somewhat disappointed in my answer and iterated how that really wasn't the focus of the department.

I think I have a better answer now. The more I think about it in this long interim, the more I realize that my true love is teaching. I want to teach college kids to write and how to write well. Now of course I want to integrate what I learned about new technologies and the like, different texts = different ways of writing. But even then in my professor's office I knew on some subconscious level that I was interested more in the structure rather than the content.

It's really the teaching. In my current part time job as a writing tutor, I love it when the kids finally "get" something and when I see their writing improve. Even if it takes a long while, at the very least I seem to be good at helping them see that writing is not the horrific behemoth they once thought.

Hopefully the above ideas come across not quite as cheesy but just as heartfelt as they would in person.