I am a professor of English and writing at an awesome community college in San Antonio, TX.  I received my PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M University in 2007, and have taught at Texas State, Texas A&M, and several colleges in Louisiana. I live in San Antonio with my husband, twin offspring, three cats, and an ivory ball python.

My specialty in teaching is American Literature but I LOVE pop culture, and will be working a lot of references to movies, TV, games, music, advertisements, and anything else that I can possibly integrate into helping students learn how to better argue, write, read, and understand other people's arguments and writing.

I am a serious video game player, from RPGs and MMOS to cute Animal Crossing games (although I feel like that has run its course). I also love fitness games and have been doing some of those in VR recently and am loving them. I also am a fan of unicorns & Bitmojis and awkward cringe memes, which I will ruin for students on a daily basis. I am a member of the Texas Public Radio Worth Repeating story board. Want to listen to a sad (but sometimes funny) story I told in May 2022? Here you go. Mine is the second one in (at about the 9 minute mark). 

Teaching Philosophy

I am the first generation of my family to have finished college, and I know from first-hand knowledge how empowering the act of learning & great teaching can be. It literally and figuratively has saved my life, many times over. Everything I do comes from that place, but I am always also that kid who had very little but her library card to get there. 

On the first day of my literature class, I tell students I’m going to teach them all of my secrets to learn to outwit me. And when I teach writing, I tell students that no one is born a good writer. Practice, multiple drafts, and multiple page writing assignments are the core of my syllabus. Students perform multiple peer-reviews and are given chances to re-do even graded essays after I have seen them, for partially improved credit. Process-based, daily writing is key, and my approach is to show students how to proceed from the brainstorming stage to drafts to final research-based writing. But we also look at the underlying rhetoric of argument, including visual arguments, to understand communication. 

One writing lesson plan where we look at the fundamentals of communication is watching the critically acclaimed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called “Hush,” where the characters lose their voices. Buffy must find a way to defeat the monsters and everyone must communicate in non-verbal ways. Students watch the episode thinking it’s simply a fun blow-off assignment, until I give them an in-class assignment where they write an essay that considers all the ways communication happens in the episode. I have gotten some of the most amazing analyses of nonverbal and verbal language in this essay from students who say they never thought of language that way before. 

I believe in combining traditional literature with writing instruction in ways that involve the students, more than me just lecturing. One favorite lesson for both college & secondary students is where we pretend that the main character in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is on trial for the murder of Homer Barron. The students split into prosecution and defense. They are then charged with finding the evidence to convict or acquit Emily. Always, I emphasize that finding the evidence in each story is how you start writing about it, how you examine what the author has put there for you to discuss and debate in your own writing. Students love this activity, and understand from that class on how to think, and really close-read texts. And they always find the evidence that they otherwise skimmed in getting to the end of the story. I call this “Yoknapatawpha County, CSI.”  Another fun lesson plan is on the Southern Gothic styling of Flannery O'Connor. 

I love to use technology in the classroom: popular culture, visuals, protest music, hypertext, movie clips, YouTube, authors reading their own work, and PowerPoints that combine all these elements. This includes combining traditional narratives with unexpected ones— like using classic rock songs Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby” to re-imagine Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” and thus explore themes of isolation versus protection in literature. Students learn that poetry is absolutely everywhere. Literature comes off the page and surrounds them, and they stop saying “I hate poetry.” 

The students at my college are so enthusiastic and appreciative of the education they are working hard to achieve. It is also the first campus I've worked with that has a large percentage of students who come from working class backgrounds like I did, and I truly want to continue to be an advocate for them. 

Books are dangerous. They are a path to power, and I hope to put that power into each and every student's hands. They are also a path to sheer joy, and I hope that I show students a taste of that.  

For a sample of my fiction/poetry, check out my sometimes updated creative website at http://kimwells.net/