Introduction

Hi! I'm Dr. Vytautas Malesh, and this is my teaching blog!

Most instructors / professors / teachers keep some sort of running log of their ups and downs in the classroom. They keep track of notable students, reflect on lesson plans which really worked, and toss links and other ephemera onto the page to save for later.

My own teaching journals in the past have been pretty jumbled -- quite literally shoeboxes full of notes, old bank boxes stuffed with forgotten portfolios, salvaged emails downloaded into word docs...you get the idea.

I was inspired by one of my high school teachers, Ms. Anne Gautreau, who in 2017 recounted to me a story of one of my own eureka moments over twenty years ago brought into the present through her excellent sense of posterity and commitment to record keeping.  That is to say that she bothered to write down something remarkable shortly after it happened in the classroom, and carried that story forward to improve her own teaching.

And so I'm following the lead of a very, very good teacher in the hopes that I will be called the same. 

So who is this blog for? 

FOR ME:  This is an ongoing record of success and failure, of what works and what doesn't.  It's a place to brainstorm, to recollect, and to review.

FOR STUDENTS:  You can see through these pages that your instructors are, in fact, human beings with feet of clay who (often) err, and who adapt and learn from our shared classroom time just the same as you do.  If you happen to read this blog, you might get a little context and color for our classroom work and assignments, and you might find that missing idea or two which will help you make it all click. 

FOR TEACHERS:  We're all in this together - I can't meet every other instructor of writing for coffee, crullers, and commiseration - this is the next best thing, and in some ways an even better thing since here we have assembled notes, comments, fresh impressions, and even a link to a lesson plan or two. 

So if you're reading this far, thanks!  I can't promise this blog will be of interest to anyone but myself (and not even always that), but I can promise to be honest and to try to make something good.