Personal Educational Philosophy Statement
Winchester rifle heiress, Sarah Winchester, began building a house for herself in 1884. Roughly 40 years later, at the time of her death, she was still building. Most everything I’ve read states that the building was non-stop, and at times, took place 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Ms. Winchester never had a master-plan for the house, and as such, the house is filled with odd angles, windows that once looked outside now opening into other rooms, and staircases that lead only to ceilings and walls. Disputes exist as to why she never stopped building, but one thing is sure, hearing the workers hammering and sawing away was one of the few things that kept Ms. Winchester moving forward when her husband and child did not. She had no goal other than to keep going.
It's a tragic story, sure, but I bring it up because of how perfectly it frames my core educational beliefs. If a good education empowers the individual, then the educator must always be changing, tweaking, and building new lessons and new ideas. But, it’s also important to leave a history and allow it to shape the future. Ms. Winchester never bulldozed her house and started over, not even after a major earthquake brought down whole wings and toppled many of the top floors; she just cleaned up the debris and went right back to building off of what was already there.
Today, we look at the Winchester Mansion with a sense of wonder and accomplishment, with awe and responsibility (it is a National Historic Place, after all). This is exactly how I want my students to consider their education. I want them to long for the magic of the epiphany, but also understand all the work that is necessary to reach that point and be proud that they did it. I want to compel them to strive for the unknown, to be eager to discover what it is they do not know. Most of all, I want my own curiosity, my continuous building to serve as a blueprint for a life of interest and enriching encounters.
Naturally, my methods for doing this have evolved due to experience and who I happen to be teaching at the moment, but a few things remain constant; direct intentions to assignments and exams, transparency in the assessment of those assignments and exams, and purpose in everything we do in and out of the classroom. In action, this approach takes many forms, but the most relevant and useful is open and honest dialogue between student and teacher. What that dialogue reveals to both of us is a process by which ideas are allowed to bear fruit. That process is rarely pretty, even more rarely intuitive, and yet, the process serves as the foundation for it all.
When it comes right down to it, my fascination with Sarah Winchester’s house isn’t the product of 40 years of building, it’s what drove her to build, what motivated her to keep adding on. I love processes more than products; whether it’s houses, cars, or poems. Work-in-progress is work. Finished work is a product. Why and how are just more interesting questions than what. When I walk around Sarah’s house, I’m less likely to wonder at a door that opens into a wall than I am to wonder how she came to that decision in the first place.
In that sense, my English classroom is a maker-space. We spend the bulk of our time either writing, or looking at writing and seeing how it got put together; what makes it tick, if you will. Processes can be similar, but are rarely ever the same, much like the students who learn about them. Teaching, education, really, is all about the moving parts and how you respond to them; it should be exciting, it should be enriching, but most of all, it should be a life-long journey, and THAT is what I want all my students to take away from me.