Stories from the Front

Am I the only one who didn’t learn to read until graduate school, or possibly until I started teaching? A convergence of things brought me to this realization. My current institution’s most recent alumni magazine included a feature on our New Media Studies program. It started only two ...

I really don’t intend to undercut the title of this series of blogs. I promise I don’t. But what happens when the classroom doesn’t have a front where the eager students sit ready to learn or a back where more laid-back students lean away from us? What ...

At first glance, the public restrooms at the Sogang University Graduate School of Theology look just like the restrooms on any seminary campus in America. But as I approached the men’s room, I saw a paper sign taped to the wall, identifying the restroom as “for professor usage (male)”. ...

It’s late summer in North America. The days are breezy, the nights are cool. Students in athletics t-shirts and shower shoes shuffle around campus. Here in Alma the intermittent sounds of marching bands, coaches’ whistles, and bagpipes hover over the lawns. And best of all, the air has that “...

I first discovered that I loved to teach when I was 19 years old at the front of a classroom of 70 adolescents in the city of Urumqi, a huge city in northwest China. Supposedly, I was teaching them English. In reality, these 13- and 14-year olds knew English rather well. They ...