My beliefs about my teaching

I see the role of a teacher as that of a guide. I feel that education should be grounded in a strong foundation of language, and I think that the compartmentalization of subjects is a danger. There is a rich possibility for cross-curricular approaches and for bolstering student knowledge about diverse aspects of the wider world. If I am doing my job right, I should be coming into classes with a clear idea of what I will teach, but how students learn should be driven by their own interests and talents, and if a lesson branches off into unexpected directions because students want to explore them, I should be able to guide them down those paths.