Teaching, I believe, is a vocation that should be pursued by those who can help students to not just master required subject matter but develop skills for critical thinking, so that, they in turn, will be able to contribute to and further build on the accumulated body of knowledge in their chosen fields. To successfully achieve the aforesaid objective requires personal commitment; mastery of the subject being taught; originality and creativity; and the ability to make students relate to the subject matter.
Given my own views on 'teaching,' I was naturally pleased to find that the objectives of my course had been carefully structured and defined to meet precisely the above-mentioned requisites. This has been particularly meaningful for me as both a student today, and hopefully, as a teacher of high schools students tomorrow.
The personal importance of successfully achieving the stated goals of the English program led to my reviewing my portfolio with a view to finding examples of work that would demonstrate a wide, but knowledgeable application of the content and skills learnt from the course. From all the pieces reviewed, I found that my work on Moby Dick and The Awakening were best equipped to showcase my abilities.
My work on Moby Dick, I believe, demonstrates an understanding of literary content as well as the development of literary and communication skills. The assimilation of literary knowledge shows through in the identification of Melville's use of symbols and allegories as a literary technique in order to espouse a more meaningful sub-text of man's search for his true place in the universe and his relationship with God. The piece also identifies Melville's masterpiece as having been canonized in American and world literature as a great classic given that Moby Dick strikes a perennial chord in the collective human consciousness, dealing as it does, with the theme of man's relationship with God and his fate.
The work on Moby Dick further reveals the recognition and use of critical approaches, as evidenced in the comment on Melville's use of imagery in depicting the divine power of the whale, including the color white to signify a special sanctity. Blended in both the essay and Melville's writing, one sees the delineation of the philosophical context as well. Take, for example, the exploration of the significance of the color white down the ages and across cultures or the allusions to the Bible and the Old Testament.
In Moby Dick, I also found a real effort to research the body of critical literature available on the classic and the use of the same to form, develop and defend the thesis that Melville intended Moby Dick to study man's relationship with his universe, fate and God.
Though the piece I wrote on Kate Chopin's The Awakening demonstrates the knowledge and application of similar literary content and skills, the effort holds personal meaning in that, this piece reflects the successful assimilation of the book into the wider sociological context of the women's rights movements and the problems faced by women in the patriarchal society of the 19th century. In fact, the essay begins by identifying the book as belonging to the genre of the feminist movement though the novel was way ahead of its time and regarded as scandalous when first published. But the real gratification for being able to relate Chopin's book to the social issue of the emancipation of women comes from the fact that it correlates with my own intellectual and emotional value system and from the knowledge that the ability to derive personal meaning from literary material will be vital to my teaching my own students that very same skill in the future.
In my work on The Awakening, I also found a more developed and heightened aesthetic and critical awareness, judging from the comment on Chopin's ability to reach out and invite her audience to experience with her the sometimes intense and often expansive sense of being. My piece on The Awakening satisfies in another respect as well, which is that it does move between concrete and abstract levels of thinking. Take, for example, the interpretation of Edna's learning to swim as indicating the developing of an ability to navigate in waters that are over her head or her attempts to paint as a means of expression, being interwoven to further support the theory that The Awakening is the story of a woman in search of the freedom to find her true self.
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