1. Alex Boswell
12/5/2012
Category: Inquiry and Intellectual Growth
Devotion to My Own Intellectual Growth and Providing Meaningful Responses to Student Work
This document below is a graded essay on Lysistrata, an ancient Greek play, for a course titled
Women in Literature. The essay also provides comments from my professor. It serves as an example of how
my own essay writing continues to develop, and as evidence of my work as a scholar of literature.
The comments that my professor wrote on my paper are both encouraging and critical in a constructive
manner. This is an example of one kind of mentorship that I expect to use as a model for when I am grading
and critiquing the work of students. I believe that students deserve more than just a grade on their work. They
deserve unique and meaningful responses that can help guide them to the next level of their intellectual growth.
In addition, this document serves as an example of my engagement with literature. Lysistrata could be
an interesting text for high school students because it can be used to talk about war and peace, marginalized
voices, gender, the importance of sexual consent, and how issues of the past can persist in the present day.
Lysistrata also contains complex symbols, and other literary elements, that contribute to the richness of the
text and interesting literary analyses.
I commit to having carefully developed and meaningful responses to the work of each student. Along
with using my professor’s feedback on my paper as a model for responding to students, I think more structure
could be added to the feedback with the use of a rubric. A rubric could help students to more clearly see what
skills they are great at and which ones would benefit from extra attention. I also commit to my own intellectual
growth, to being fully engaged in the texts that I teach, and able to provide an informed, complex, and
interesting learning environment. As a teacher, I am also a continuous learner finding new texts and materials
that can be used in the classroom, while also revisiting texts and materials that I have studied in the past.