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Featured Teacher
The Collins Outstanding Professor
Award is an annual honor voted on by Baylor's senior class. In May, the
2008 recipient, Mona Choucair, gave a lecture about her love of
teaching. The following is an excerpt from that speech.
Many people ask me why I teach. Here are just some of the reasons:
Teaching is a passion.
Let me give you an example: I was teaching The Tell-Tale Heart,
a classic short story by Edgar Allen Poe, to my ninth graders one day
at Waco High School. I couldn't just go in and talk about Poe, his
earring, his West Point days, his drug habit, etc. And I couldn't just
read the story and quiz them on it. I had to elaborate. I had to
exaggerate. I had to be passionate!
So, I got to the part about the dismemberment of the body, saying yes,
he cut off the arms and legs and hid them under the
 slats of the wooden
floor. I am sure my eyes got bigger because the kids were excited, and
I was thrilled with the suspense and the interest that I had elicited.
I would stand on my head to get those fourteen-year-olds enthused.
Well, a few days go by, and I get called into the principal's office.
"Mona," he said, "Did you teach about murder, mayhem, and maybe a
little dismemberment recently? A parent has complained that little
Johnny can't sleep at night because he is so scared." I smiled and
said, "Let me tell you why Johhny can't sleep. He naps from 2:20-3:30
daily in my seventh-period class. He finally got excited about one
story. Sorry, I can't contain my passion." He laughed and said, "Okay,
just tone it down a bit, Choucair."
"Yeah, okay," I replied--knowing all the while that that would be impossible for me.
If we aren't passionate about our subject matter, the students won't be
either. That's what I tell my teacher candidates, too. Teach like you
mean it. Teach like you love it, or don’t teach at all. Or to borrow
from the title of a great book on education by Rafe Esquith, "Teach
like your hair's on fire."
Teaching is learning to become vulnerable with your students.
I remember Callie, a beautiful freshman in one of the first classes I
taught as a graduate student at Baylor. She was so full of life and so
in love with boys--and so not
into my writing class. We worked very hard on that child's writing. She
came in my office every stinking day. We drilled. We wrote. We wadded
up paper and threw it in the trash. We talked about life, her little
sister that she adored, her boyfriends, her biology class, her
roommates.
She did okay in my class, and then I lost track of her. Two years
later, she called me from a hospital. She was doing better and couldn't
wait to get back to Baylor. Could she call or write me from time to
time? I told her yes, of course.
"And Dr. C, I got a compliment on a journal entry I wrote the other
day," she told me. "They said it sounded good. I said, 'You mean
coherent. That's what my English professor, Dr. C, would say!'"
Callie died in a car wreck later that year, and I got to talk to her
mom and send her some of Callie's essays. One was about her family and
how much she adored that little sister, who is coming to Baylor soon.
One was about her granny and the smell of coming home.
"Thanks for loving her," her mom said. "That was the easy part," I replied.
Vulnerability--it's part of it.
God has given me a
talent to tell stories and teach writing and literature and "how to
teach." Some people search a lifetime to find something they love. I
have that.
My students kid me because I tell them that a great day for me is one
spent at Barnes & Noble with as many books as possible nestled at
my side. Why? Because I lose myself. I want that for them. I hope that
my students lose themselves in a novel, a short story, an essay--if
only for the expanse of thirty or forty-five minutes. I hope they are
transported to another place, another time, another glimpse of life. I
hope that they love the journey that books allow them.
Students come to your
class day after day, and you see them and interact with them. However,
you really can't imagine their collective talents.
One student, Becky, asked me to come to her senior recital, and I told
her I'd love to hear her vocal performance. That night, she walked onto
the stage in a gorgeous red evening gown--totally transformed from the
young lady that sat in my class--and she opened her mouth. Her mezzo
soprano voice was absolutely amazing, and I cried like a proud grandma.
She would have been mortified! So I had to excuse myself, get up, and
dry my eyes before coming back for the other performances.
Becky sat right in front of me all semester, and I had no idea of her
amazing gift--her story. It means so much to me to be part of these
students' lives. I took such pride in being her teacher--as if I had
anything to do with her talent!
I am passionate about creating a safe haven for students.
I had the privilege of teaching returning adults at McLennan Community
College, and they were often so scared to walk in that college door
after--for many--fifteen or twenty years. One lady, Mary, told me that
she prayed that the class would be closed because she was so scared.
How could she, a fifty-year-old woman, gather the courage to go back to
school and sit among nineteen year olds?
Well, she did it, and I was the one who learned so much from her in
that writing class. She shared her life story in those essays for my
class; we learned about one another. She worked all day, raised her
grandkids, and had a second job on the weekends. I admired her so much.
She wanted to drop out of the class midway through. We negotiated an
incomplete, and we celebrated when she finished. She said she had grown
so much through our class discussions and through the writing lab.
She--like so many others--was intimidated by the computer, and now
she's a pro.
You have to create that safe place for students to learn--no matter their age and stage. You have to make it happen.
I am passionate about
teaching at Baylor because it allows me a unique opportunity to share
my faith and hear about my students' struggles.
When we study the Romantics, we read Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale Young Goodman Brown,
the quintessential short story about what happens to someone when he
abandons his faith. We discuss what happened to Goodman after he met
with the devil in the forest. We talk about what happened to his wife,
aptly named "Faith." We talk about what we would do if our faith were
tested.
I am passionate about teaching because my students and I can talk about real-life issues that face us daily.
We recently finished reading Tim O'Brien's award-winning novel about Vietnam, titled The Things They Carried.
It is really just a collection of great stories--some happy and some
very sad--about O'Brien's time in Vietnam. My students and I discussed
the fact that we lost over 60,000 young men in their twenties in the
Vietnam War--the very age my students are now. The very age.
We then turned our discussion to the number of lives lost in the
present Iraq War--more than 4,000 lives. But they aren't just numbers;
they are our brothers, sisters, friends, husbands, wives, grandsons,
and granddaughters. They are people. We talk about how we all
know someone who is fighting in this war. We talk about how we live
within fifty miles of the largest military base in the U.S. We discuss
the awful loss that Fort Hood in Killeen has sustained. We discuss the
war. We discuss the media coverage of the war. We laugh, and we tear
up.
Why? Aren't we just supposed to teach the darn novel and be done with
it? I want the material--the stories--to pop off the page and be
relevant now. I believe that
is part of my job as an educator and a storyteller. When we read the
words on the page, I want them to have resonance and meaning in a
greater context. Tim O’Brien says this of stories: "Stories can save
us. [In] a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile
and sit up and return to the world."
I like to end my classes with "Follow your syllabus, have a good day,
and God Bless." And so to you, I say, "Keep reading, and keep your
stories alive. Have a great day and God Bless you all!"
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