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Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time of experimentation in which they are given the opportunity to find where that passion resides so that they can take that next step in learning the life paths they wish to take.

I would need to practice what I preach, of course. I believe that it benefits students to see a teacher's love of his or her subject outside of school. To that end, I truly enjoy sharing my love of research writing, poetry, informal essay writing, and writing in general, and especially-- at the appropriate moments-- enjoy sharing my own work with students. I do this by integrating this work into the lessons I've created so that they are learning the skill at the same time they are seeing my personal joy in writing. This sharing of work has the added benefit of illustrating that what we learn has application outside the four walls of the classroom.

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