Transcripts of Kevin

Hello my name is Kevin De Pew, I am a assistant Professor at Old Dominion University, and I'm here to tell you a story about my writing development over the years. I guess I was, I'll start with an analogy. When I was running track and field in High School, one of my, my coach, the head coach, who was a coach of distance runners, he said one of the reasons that he coached the distance runners was because he was a sprinter, and it would really really frustrate him to coach sprinters, because he was so good at it. And I kind of brought that into writing, because during High School and even during some of my College careers, I was not considered to be a good writer. And so that helps me as a writing teacher, to have a little bit of empathy for my students. So let me take this back to Honors English in 10th grade, I remember writing a Hamlet essay, an essay on Hamlet that scored a 52 out of 100. And my teacher proceeded to put 7 sentences up on the board, there were 3 boards in the classroom, and she put 7 sentences up, sentences that were stylistically problematic. And there were 2 classes, 2 classes, and out of those two classes, those seven sentences are, four of them were mine, came out of my essays. And looking back on that, I see that I was doing what David Bartholomew talked about, with trying to invent the University to a degree, trying to be stylistic in ways that were above and beyond my capabilities. But it started this kind of reinforcement that I wasn't a good writer. And then also as I was writing my Master's thesis... The person who I was working with also helped to reinforce those ideas. It wasn't until I got into my PHD program that it became more of a non issue. You know I wasn't a good writer and no one said I was a bad writer, People just said "bear with it." I sometimes... I'm not going to say that I'm a good writer now, but sometimes I'll go back and read stuff that I have written, and wow, it's actually kind of good. So it's kind of been this long journey for me. I think some of my earlier experiences have been very valuable in the sense that I can take that into the classroom, and I have more empathy for my students who often struggle at that point, and I can give them better strategies on how to build their confidence in what they are doing.