My Teaching Philosophy

I would have to say my teaching philosophy is not very novel. It is really quite simple: try to engage the students and make learning interesting. That concept sounds simple to me now but I know if will be much more difficult to put into practice once I get into the classroom. How do you make it interesting for everyone when everyone is so different? I think this is a question I will be more prepared to answer once I actually have some classroom experience. However, I can make some guesses as to how I can attempt to accomplish this task.
The main thing I would like to focus on is giving the students as many choices as possible. In today's classroom teachers are crunched for time and trying to accommodate everyone is nearly impossible. Yet, I think there are certain ways we can let our students make some decisions about what they want to learn. I would like to let them have a hand in choosing some of the works we read each year. While we can't read just anything in the class, I think value can be found in many more works of writing than what we typically have students read. There are certain works that we are required to have students trudge through but that doesn't mean we can't include the works they might be interested in as well.
Another way to give students choice is through writing. Writing is considered by many students a chore because of the restrictions. You are given a topic, you are given guidelines and if you want the A, you must follow them. Writing to me is a form of expression and you miss a lot of student's actual point of view as you put more and more restrictions of them.
Probably my biggest philosophy is teaching is to teach to think critically rather than memorizing. To me, English is subject that is so open to interpretation that students should be allowed to analyze and draw their own conclusions. I don't want students to read a work, have me tell them the way they should interpret it, and then have them regurgitate that information back to me in test format. I want to have more of an open discussion atmosphere. We all have different backgrounds and previous experiences so it is ridiculous to think we will all read something the exact same way.