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A Handful of My Stories – as an Introduction and a Philosophy:

Stories instruct us, entertain us, tease us, lead us.  Here are a handful of mine.

I have been teaching at CCSF since 1996.

I’ve often made this claim; I believe it’s still true.  I teach English (and most everything else) the same way I use to teach swimming to children and adults; I want my students to learn well, and then to come back to the pool and, ideally, to seek out the ocean too.

I only have the one degree, but I also spent nine years in graduate school exploring, learning, and teaching; it was a life that suited me at the time.  I was a generalist in a forum favoring specialists, and I changed my official focus many times.  I believed – and still believe – in reading beyond what’s assigned.  For example, I read most of William Faulkner and Richard Ford while I was studying Renaissance Drama Beyond Shakespeare, Old English, and Pastoral Poetry.  I studied Latin and Old English while reading and rereading crime novels and other contemporary genre fiction.  What’s stacked and in rotation on my reading table now?  A marine biology guide, Nicola Griffith’s Spear, Craig Johnson’s Hell is Empty, surfing magazines, Ada Limon’s poetry, and Homer’s Iliad in a new translation.  Mix it up, I say.

In more formal terms, I passed Oral Exams in English Literature in the fields of The Neo-Classic Period, the Romantic Period, and Lord Byron’s Works, Letters, and Life.  I was a Ph.D candidate in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, though I never have finished that dissertation on Lord Byron and Heroism.  I found teaching at CCSF, ultimately, more distracting and far more rewarding.

I believe that stories can expand us, can allow us to expand ourselves in amazing ways.  Nancy Packer said, “There’s life on the page.  You read it, and it’s not your experience, but it expands your experience.”  I believe that stories reveal and revive the human heart and soul, especially fiction.  I’m a particular aficionado of stories with strong characters and strong plots; I often think complex or otherwise meaningful plotting is overlooked or undervalued by most scholars or critics, but that such plotting resonates appropriately with common readers. (And I use that phrase – “common readers” – as Virginia Woolf meant it, with respect.) With stories, as with life, you must allow your emotions full range; a merely intellectual response is insufficient; the best readers think and feel, reflect and react . . . with gusto.

I recommend bringing such gusto to nonfiction too.  For me, anything written about the ocean or about underwater adventure deserves attention, even though none of my college credits mattered for that. I’ve gotten in the ocean to look around for myself, and I’ve kept reading, reflecting, and studying.  I encourage my students to do the same.

Course themes:

English 1A – Adventures in Non-fiction and Research

English 1B – Adventures in Literature

--Matt Duckworth

4/28/22