I am an explorer and an adventurer.  I regularly seek out new knowledge that interests me.  In turn, I share what knowledge I have with my students and my colleagues, gladly and without hesitation.  As a teacher I am a facilitator, helping my students to understand the power of language, the joys of scientific discovery, and the beauty of literature and other arts in their own lives.  I enjoy teaching because I enjoy sharing knowledge; it is one of those pleasant rarities where vocation and avocation line up together.

    In my previous career as a database developer and manager, my purpose was to enable people to share knowledge with one another, which often involved helping them to think more critically about the information they gathered and used as they did their work. When I taught computer classes, my job was to help people who were often computer-shy to recognize the computer and its software as benign tools which they could master and which could improve their productivity. The challenges that come with teaching English are similar: many of my writing students have been convinced by previous experiences that writing well is beyond their abilities. When I teach these students, I work to place the role and importance of writing in a context they can understand, to immerse them in the pool of knowledge instead of simply pelting them with rules of logic and grammar. I'm not always successful, but that only encourages me to find more and better ways of connecting with my students and helping them connect with the larger world.

    We are all writers, and the language belongs to each of us.  We are all humans, and the experiences of our fellows is shareable among each of us.  A teacher wields a table knife, spreading butter evenly on dry bread.  The butter is knowledge, sweet and smooth, melting into the pits and pocks of our lives and fundamentally altering our experience.  A generous and open teacher can change lives for the better, sharing knowledge and the desire for more and enriching the world ever so slightly.  As Bertrand Russell said, the good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.  Without them, he might agree, we are toast.