I like to consider myself a “good” teacher.  I know, however, that I’m not a “great” teacher.  I don’t respond to e-mails quickly enough, and it’s rare that students stop by my office hours.  The final grades in my courses are generally too high, and the assignments I give are usually too complicated.  Every semester, I’m including some new aspect of technology which I don’t fully understand myself, let alone how it will work when applied to a group of students who don’t spend their free time reading up on social media ad campaigns.

Am I still a good teacher?  I think so.  But my major focus in teaching is to help students see the world beyond the classroom.  Part of this, I know, is due to my own shortcomings as a teacher and researcher.  Honestly, it’s hard for me to focus on reading.  And this is a bad (very bad) admission for a creative writer.  I work on writing novels, but it’s been a while since I’ve read one all the way through.  And yet I still do well in graduate school.  As a reader and a writer, I’m able to assimilate information from a wide variety of sources to share coherent arguments.  Sometimes, I’ll catch people off-guard by relating something from Yahoo! Personals to student psychology.  I use Facebook in my teaching – and then I teach my students how to use Facebook even better than they did before.

And why?  It’s not because of my short attention span – no.  It’s because I tried to ignore Facebook for a long time, not realizing that I needed the technology in my own work as a writer.  It took a long time, but I began to realize that the internet has revolutionized not only our economy and the ways we think, but in the ways we can think.  I don’t need to take an auto shop class at the community college to learn how to change the headlight alignment in my car – I can Google the YouTube on my iPhone while standing in the parking lot.

Google and YouTube, however, only represent one side of this – Facebook brings these information connections to a new level of personalization.  I can Google information that I want to know, but my friends on Facebook provide me with news and information I didn’t even know to ask about.  They tag my experiences, remind me of my birthday, and let me know that I’m not alone, even if I am sitting listless at the keyboard.

Yet I tried to avoid this.  I thought it was dumb.  I thought it was a waste of time.  I told myself that friendships – real friendships – were built on personal interaction.  Genuine interaction.

It wasn’t until I began building my own website that I realized that Facebook might be helpful.  I wanted to run online writing workshops from home, and I needed customers.  I thought the internet would make it easy to connect to others – I was using Search Engine Optimization and I was e-mailing essays to other bloggers and I was sitting at the keyboard, ready.

That’s when I read about Net 2.0.  How it was no longer about content, but rather context.  Social context.  Connections to those who take in the information you’re providing.

So I signed up for Facebook.  I started posting some ads.  I began friending my friends – the friends I’d known for years, but had lost touch with.  I watched my ads fail as friendships were renewed.

Four years later, I can say that I’ve gotten better at using Facebook ads.  I can tell you how I attracted 18,000 fans to my website, and I can tell you why the number has not translated into profits.  I can explain how my website has failed to effectively use social networking to increase connections among visitors.

But I learned none of this in school.  I’ve never been to a writing conference which effectively explained Facebook ads.  Most of what I know about websites I learned through Google, HubPages, and the dozens of links I followed from the search engines.  And no, my website hasn’t really “succeeded” yet.  It is, in fact, operating at a huge financial loss right now – as a business, it’s not exactly working.  But as a learning experience, it’s been phenomenal.  I now know more about taxation, employment law, perseverance, audiences, and networking than I even thought to wonder about.  When politicians talk about job creation and our floundering economy, I can honestly say that I understand why businesses fail.  I know what it’s like stay afloat without customers – and I watch in dismay as we try to salvage an economy which no longer requires as many cars, an economy populated by consumers who really don’t want to pay “Made in USA” prices for the goods they use every day.

But I learned none of this in school.  In school, I learned how to research.  In school, I learned how to read an article, understand what it was saying, and then write a coherent argument in response.  In school, my teachers provided me the tools and the background knowledge to continue my learning long after graduation.

My hope, then, is that I can provide a similar experience for my students.  The difference, though, is that my students have grown up with Facebook.  They yawn at the sight of blogs.  They don’t bother with HTML because WYSIWYG has rendered it passe.

The challenge, then, is to convince them that the critical thinking skills that I learned in school are still applicable today, and that they can adapt these skills to not only take in information from the internet, but to shape the way that information reaches them.

Unfortunately, this is one style of teaching which is rarely taught in schools.

This, to me, seems particularly scary, since I regularly rack up $5,000 credit card bills.  But there’s a way to avoid this dilemma: always save money.  Use the credit cards to maintain responsible cash flow rather than simply suck interest payments out of your soul.

VHA: Velociraptor, Home, and Auto.  Comprehensive Insurance for Life After Velociraptors.

I recently posted an answer on Facebook to “What Are the Best Schools in the United States for a Degree in Creative Writing?“  The answer I gave focused more on my own experiences earning an MFA from Johns Hopkins, and how you can learn from those experiences in choosing a large program versus a small program, or whether to choose a program with a teaching requirement.  In case you don’t use Facebook or would prefer to see the article without the other answers, I’ve also Posted My MFA Answer Here.

If you’re not sure you want to pursue an MFA, you might want to check out an earlier article I wrote on Choosing the Right Writing Workshop.  The focus of the article is on the various types of workshops (distance versus in-person), but it also leads into whether you should take the next step of earning an MFA.

12Writing.com – The central homepage, this is where you can find news, interesting articles, and book recommendations.

IFP.12Writing.com – Introduction to Fiction and Poetry – This is the homepage for the IFP course I teach at Johns Hopkins.  Here you can find articles for beginning writers along with lesson plans for Part 2 of the course (currently in progress).

TheHuman.12Writing.com – I taught Writing the Human in Science Fiction during this past Intersession at Johns Hopkins.  This blog offers insights into writing narrative and plot, particularly as applies to writing in science fiction.

WordPlanet.12Writing.com – This is the new Undergraduate Online Literary Journal for Johns Hopkins.  We’re currently accepting submissions for our inaugural issue – be sure to take a look if you’re Hopkins student interested in publishing your work online.

Dragons.12Writing.com – The Unfinished NaNoWriMo novel!  This online story aims to answer the fundamental question that drives all existence: who wins?  The dragons?  Or the machine guns?

Lost in Germany – August 2005
Holiday Greetings From Afghanistan
Some Adobe Photoshop Artwork
The Fundamental Importance of Public Education

You can visit my HubPages Article on Preventing Burnout Among U.S. Military Units for thoughts on how we can better maintain our military’s combat effectiveness.

“Writing Action – Parts 1 and 2” on Bill Henderson’s TrueVoice Blog.

“Because the Truth Hurts: Why I Write Fiction Instead of Autobiography” in the archives (with new discussion on 12writing.com)

Dagny v. Writer on Scribophile.