My Teaching Philosophy

The main question that guides every aspect of my teaching and every interaction I have with a student is “what would I have needed when I was an undergraduate in order to succeed in this class, in my future classes, and in life after graduation?”

My ambition of teaching classes that are as practical as they are high-minded drives the reading lists and sequencing of my syllabuses; it inspires innovative assignments that push students to take calculated risks; it shapes the pacing and scope of our class discussions; and, most of all, it compels me to give the kind of thorough, constructive feedback on written work that I so rarely got when I was the student.

Since my courses tend to substitute for several others and give students a framework for understanding content across their education, I strive to select works that are simultaneously representative of a genre or worldview and therefore important on their own, distinct enough that students can find significant differences between readings, and also complementary to one another so that students can make original connections and discover points of contact and divergence between various cultures and outlooks using the primary sources. In my introductory seminar “Legacy of Success,” for example, we read Roman satire by Horace, Juvenal, and Petronius so that students can develop a basic sense of how people in the Golden Age of Rome measured success—but there are payoffs much later in the semester, such as when we read The Great Gatsby, a work modeled after an important episode in Petronius’s The Satyricon that I could hardly have assigned on its own. Students in that class read American autobiographies by Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass which are important on their own, but which also provide points of contrast with The Great Gatsby and other course selections. Because I structure my syllabuses chronologically and fill them with culturally significant texts that have many harmonies and just enough dissonances, students consistently discover for themselves, using the primary sources, the same sorts of things they would hear in a history lecture about the same period, such as the rise of the individual and the evolving role of knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and again into the Enlightenment.

As a former Honors student who went away, got his PhD in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature, and now gets to teach the kinds of interdisciplinary classes he wishes he could have taken as an undergraduate at UNM, I know the value of transparency not only in my expectations of my students but also in why I expect them to do the things I ask them to do. I find that students learn the most when they have a stake in the readings, classroom discussions, written work, and other assignments that comes from understanding ahead of time which skills they will be cultivating and how each activity will prepare them for more advanced tasks later in the course and later in life.

Students respond well to the high degree of transparency in my expectations for their written work, too. I devote substantial class time to explaining the parameters and expectations for each major assignment. (Please see a selection of sample assignments in my “Supporting Documents.”) We may spend an entire class session going over the instruction prompts and discussing potential problems they may encounter along the way. Since I am a more seasoned writer, my students are glad to hear my advice for strategies for writing well as well as avoiding common pitfalls of each assignment and of college writing in general. In this preparatory discussion, I overtly tell them that the only way to improve is by working reflectively and with great awareness of what they are doing. I structure my assignments to minimize the potential for BS; my job is to hold my pupils to a higher standard than they may hold themselves. I would rather set a high bar that they can approach than a low bar that they can effortlessly meet without learning anything new. I therefore take the view that a good assignment should compel students to pay attention to what they are doing, and that they should not be able to crank it out in a couple of hours before it is due. This means, in part, asking them to think in new ways and to ask questions that they could not have imagined they could ask, or to approach something familiar in an unorthodox way. In order to build a rigorous argument, they find that they must reflect deeply on where the evidence points them rather than where they want it to go. In this way, I teach my students how to teach themselves how to think more rigorously and honestly—especially when it results in a revised thesis and argument that matches the data rather than simply projecting their preconceived notions onto a topic. This kind of thinking does not come easily at first for most of them, but through practice and awareness of what they are doing, it becomes more natural for them and eventually gives them an edge in their other classes.

In addition to my clear and thorough instructions for each assignment, I have created a number of handouts to help students meet the criteria for written work in my courses. My sample MLA template has become legendary in my department, I now include my 30-page Dr. Obenauf’s Guide to Writing and Reasoning Like a Scholar in the photocopied coursepacks for all of my classes. Although it is indeed more work for students to have to read these materials and consult them as they write, they appreciate that I show them precisely how to meet my high standards and guide them through every step of the process. For each handout I have developed, I have seen students at every level more easily meet my expectations. This helps their grade on individual assignments, but it also prepares them for future work not only in my class and in their future classes, but also in life after graduation.

However, there is one thing I do each semester that I always feel a little guilty about, but there is a compelling pedagogical reason for the trick, and I explain why I did it to restore transparency to the process. On the day the first major essay is due in all of my classes, I surprise my students by offering everyone an extension to revise their papers. Once they settle down from the betrayal of having stayed up all night finishing the paper, everybody is relieved to have some extra time to proofread and polish it. But rather than leaving them to in-class peer-review or other exercises that put them at the mercy of other nonexperts, I distribute my “Revision Triage Checklist” (included in the “Supporting Documents” of this application) and we spend the day talking about it. I have been developing this handout since I was first teaching in graduate school. I initially saw a need for a brief tool that students could use to check basic formatting and I could hold them more accountable for meeting basic expectations on their own, without intervention from me, from CAPS, or from their classmates. Through the years, it has grown from a one-page handout into a six-page document, yet its purpose remains the same. It steers students towards good habits and efficiently outlines basic principles that they may not have learned in their previous classes. Whether they have just a few minutes or several days, my handout guides them in maximizing their grade while also maximizing their learning. When I hear back from former students, they often tell me that they continue to use the “Revision Triage Checklist.” These materials support student success in my class and in their other classes, and they help students cultivate good habits that will serve them well in their professional lives.

I have developed a reputation for my thoroughness in responding to my students’ writing. I respond deeply and carefully to each major paper, offering handwritten annotations on the document itself, and as many typed comments as necessary to help students learn as they write their next paper from the shortcomings of the project at hand. I recognize that my job is to prepare students for their other classes and for their life beyond university. Because Honors students go on to graduate and professional school at such high rates, I have a responsibility to train all of my students as competent writers, no matter the topic of the class. While some of my students are truly exceptional, I respond even to middling students as if they are truly exceptional. In some cases, I may only need to write a paragraph or two explaining why things worked well in a particular essay, offering only minor suggestions, such as regarding the placement of punctuation or quotation marks. In other cases, I may need to devote three or five pages to describing specific strategies they can take so that future projects will more intuitively serve the readers’ needs over the students’ needs as the writer. I invest this time because nobody else will. Armed with my advice, students work reflectively as they approach their next paper, and almost invariably all improve measurably in key areas such as their introduction and thesis, the overall shape of their essay, their use of evidence and their approach to analyzing it, offering a more robust conclusion, and polishing their work to make it shine, among other targets. And because I have such thorough notes on each assignment, it takes little work on my part to see whether each student followed up on my strategic feedback when I grade the next project. I know from experience that an expert mentor can point out problems and offer solutions, but the pupil must practice reflectively in order to learn and to grow.

And yet the aspect of my teaching that I am perhaps most proud of is something whose full impact cannot be measured but is anecdotally transformative for students in my class, in their future classes, and in their private lives. To prepare for each reading, I invite students reflect in their private journals on some of the upcoming themes with guided questions so that they can figure out where they stand before learning about how someone from another time and place dealt with similar issues. These journals are loosely based on the approach my mentor V.B. “Barrett” Price took when I was his student a generation ago, and it was one of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me—for understanding the course materials, for understanding myself, and for learning how to be an adult in a messy world. And so, like Barrett, after giving some historical and biographical context for each new reading, I announce a series of fifteen questions for students to consider. Sometimes these questions are broad, like “why are you at unm?” or “how are you politically?” Other times, they help students understand their worldview without directly asking them about it: “do you think people are basically good, bad, just doing the best they can, or what?” or “what’s the meaningful difference between someone who prefers using carrots and someone who prefers using sticks?” I am most grateful for Barrett’s method of asking “meaningful differences,” and several of the questions for each reading usually take this format. The idea is to suss out the distinctions between concepts that may at first appear synonymous or contrary or unrelated or closely related, but without using a dictionary or consulting any outside references. I ask students to approach these questions as if they were having to explain the difference to someone intelligent who speaks English—but who is not totally fluent in the language. This exercise trains them to consider the meanings of words and concepts on their own, while helping them model for themselves ways of organizing their thoughts.

To be sure, the journals and brief preview lectures serve as a basic kind of scaffolding. I adjust the questions slightly from semester to semester, but they are connected to or inspired by the assigned text. For instance, students may tease out their own understanding of the difference between love and loyalty before reading a medieval romance, and then as they read the poem they will be on the lookout for themes of love and loyalty that we can address in class discussion or that they may wish to pursue in a short response paper or even in one of their longer essays. These journals are effective because they are completely private: students understand that they hurt only themselves by skipping out on this key part of the class and that some of their most meaningful learning and self-discovery in their time at UNM will take place through this deep personal reflection. As an added benefit, they get much more out of the reading—a boon to class discussion, to their short response papers, and to their formal papers. But the most important reason for these journals is that they give students a chance to articulate, if only to themselves, views that they had previously only had gut feelings about—and thus help the students become more useful to themselves and to others in their civic and professional lives.

One factor that energizes my teaching and my insistence on rigor is the diverse student population and the demands of working with students who come from such a variety of backgrounds and levels of preparedness. In the classroom, I never expect any student to represent an entire group or class of people. At the same time, I know that everyone has something unique to add to any discussion, and so I recognize that all students can speak only for themselves and their own experiences. I appreciate that every student is special and unique; I cherish every opportunity to help bring each one closer to his or her full form, as scholars and as human beings. I find that they rise to the occasion, regardless of background, and make the most of the opportunity. As a historian of tolerance, I celebrate diversity of all kinds and the richness it brings our lives. We are all the better for hearing alternative points of view; as a medievalist whose syllabuses span the ancient world through the present, practically everything I teach represents a worldview markedly different from the worldviews of most people around us. The study of literature, whether contemporary or ancient, whether pursued for its historical or anthropological value, or for pleasure, is a thought experiment, an exercise in imagining what it was like to live in an alien place and time. It is as enlightening to imagine the life of a medieval cleric, farmer, or poet as it is to imagine the life of someone living today in conditions different from our own and seeing the world in ways we do not. Through the approaches I have explained in this essay, I have developed ways to help students improve as writers, readers, and thinkers in the limited span of a semester, in large part by reflecting on what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes—and to do so at a very high level. Despite (or perhaps because of) these successes, I am a little sad admitting that some of my future goals for growth would require greater job security than I enjoy as an adjunct professor, especially during a pandemic. For instance, for my 100-level Legacy of Success course, I translated the late medieval morality play Mankind into modern English. It was incredibly fulfilling and has led to other professional projects, but, in the end, it was a labor of love for which I will never be compensated. I would love to be able to translate other works I teach expressly for my students, and to pursue the other projects that might present themselves through such an undertaking. I long to grow as a teacher and as a scholar by supervising theses and working with graduate students, but, alas, those joys are reserved for professors on the tenure track. For now, my main professional goal is to keep my job so that I can continue to help my students discover, for themselves, who they really are.