John Stratton, associate professor, has spent several lifetimes teaching and working in higher education.
In his first lifetime, he received a doctorate from the University of Nebraska, with a dissertation on the structure of Shakespeare's plays.
In a later lifetime, he co-authored four books on writing, including The Writer's Hotline Handbook and Writing on the Job, a Handbook for Business and Government.
Throughout he has taught freshman composition and many kinds of literature, has started writing centers and student learning services, and has been director of freshman composition. He has also held various brain-numbing posts, including serving as dean of the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Sciences.
Currently, he teaches courses in writing, including Advanced Composition, and Technique and Style. He occasionally teaches Shakespeare; someday he will again teach a course in experimental fiction. He is exploring the fuzzy world where language and reality rub against each other, if in fact language can be separated from reality. To what extent does language shape reality, to what extent does it filter and mold our experience? Perhaps language so shapes our experience that we can only experience
and become what it will "allow" - archetypes in motion, bubbles of universal consciousness, metaphors of a reality that we feel but cannot express. He is passionate about old garden roses and waking people up to the delight and possibilities of words.
A Few Thoughts on Teaching from John Stratton
Teaching involves creating encounters - encounters between the student and the work at hand, whether that work is the student's writing or a work of literature. I try to set interesting problems, interesting for all of us, problems that require us to consider fundamental issues of writing and reading, the problems that students are used to skipping over.
Students don't always like such encounters. Like the rest of us, they have comfortable assumptions about the way the world works, the ways their minds work, and about the level of work that they can do.
I remind students that they have hired me as their personal writing coach for the semester. They have asked me to lead them, guide them, and teach them how to work their mental bodies into better shape.
They say they were signing up for a course. "No," I say. "You hired me to mess with your mind." And that is the nature of education, to create useful frustration and discomfort, to help students learn how to grow and develop - to mess with their minds so they can mess with the world.
Without frustration there is no need, no reason to mobilize your resources, to discover that you might be able to do something on your own, and in order not to be frustrated, which is a pretty painful experience, the child [i.e., the student] learns to manipulate the environment.
-Frederick Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim