Uni-Versity

An old chestnut, which I'll paraphrase, claims that any artist mostly makes the same piece of art over and over again.  Change this character from brunette to blonde, change the setting from New York to LA, but so many of the tropes and premises will remain the same that an oeuvre will emerge appearing as a consistent whole from all the disparate parts.

I'm starting to see that over the span of a teaching career, a teacher / instructor / professor (pick your title) in fact only teaches one class.  There are particulars which I might narrowly ascribe to praxis (practice or material skill) like, say, MLA formatting, resume "tone," and SEO optimization, but then there is the theoria (theory, uber-knowledge) that runs through all of it, and *that* is what we're really teaching.

So for me, for example, it doesn't matter much whether or not I'm teaching first-year composition students or advanced creative writing students, I'm always going to teach the things that I think are most important:  Critical skepticism, generous reading, evidence-based arguments, and contextual awareness.  I will always demand that students read both with and against the grain in order to understand the fullness of what they encounter.  I want them to back up every assertion not with hearsay or superstition, but with measurements, observation, research, and experience. 

Most of all, I want them to be aware of how their writing connects to the world around them. I want them to see how the life they have lived infuses that writing, and how that writing will in turn leak out into the world to change it. 

That's the point of every Dr. Tiger class.