I teach in both the Writing and Reading strands of the curriculum in NTID’s English Department. You can find the full departmental curriculum here, and it explains the English course requirements for getting a degree from NTID. This document also describes the courses themselves.

The two writing courses I teach most of the time are Academic Writing II and Academic Writing IV . I also teach Written Communication I. Students must do a lot of writing in these courses because practice makes perfect. The only way to improve your writing is to write often. In all of my writing courses, students have the option of revising each essay once to improve their grade. But this is not as easy as it might seem because I don’t give credit for students making grammatical or other corrections that I point out in the original essay. If I mark all the errors in the essay, I, not the student who made the errors, have identified those errors and therefore did that editing work. Why should students get credit for that? On the other hand, if I mark the first two or three instances of an error that is made several times in an essay and the student identifies and fixes the rest of them, I’ll give lots of credit. I’ll also give credit to students who address questions or issues that I raise about their essays. Students who take the time to clarify, expand, and elaborate in their essays will get much better grades, which makes me happy.

I know students sometimes feel they don’t know what an “A” paper looks like, so I will share some essays written by deaf students. I offer my comments on what I think is good and what is not good, and I hope these examples help students understand what kind of writing skills I am looking for. Click here for a good Academic Writing II example and a good Academic Writing IV example. These are examples of essays that need a lot of improvement.

I also teach Reading II. This course uses frequent tests to motivate students to do their homework. Like writing, the only way to improve your reading is to read a lot. And the more you read, the more you learn and know, which makes reading become easier.

Even though I still use textbooks in all of my courses, I also offer a lot of my course materials online on our own Idea Tools course management software, which I think my students very much enjoy. They can find the course syllabus there along with the entire quarter’s schedule with hot links to homework and essay assignments, plus more complete explanations of essay assignments themselves as well as web board chat conversations and their grades throughout the quarter. What I especially like as an instructor about Idea Tools is how my students can submit their essays online and I can mark them up, also online, with my comments hot linked to a checklist of grammar explanations that a colleague of mine and I developed for our students. My handwriting is so terrible that I am very pleased to have this technological alternative!

A course that I have taught in the past is Freshman Seminar. The basic goal of Freshman Seminar is to help students grow in:

Personal awareness/interpersonal skills
Community involvement, and
Academic development.
I always like to see my students develop these skills and enjoy their time in college.