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Dave Winter
Instructor, Wheeler High School
I love the school where I teach. Wheeler High School has more than 60 nationalities represented in its student body. Our principal told us recently that our superintendent views our school as "an overachieving" school because we have so much "poverty," yet we compete with the schools where the only thing more homogenous than the student population is the student parking lot.
Wheeler is in East Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia. Yes, you may have heard of the terrible county that chose to maintain its council resolution against gay citizens rather than join the rest of metropolitan Atlanta in hosting the Olympics. Thankfully, Wheeler is something of an exception to the county's "Newt-Gingrich-is-a-moderate-to-me" reputation; unlike their parent s who sent Newt back to Washington, our student elected Democratic challenger Michael Coles in their (mock) election.
Wheeler isn't perfect. We still have a lot of racial conflict and segregation on campus. Our baseball team is all-white, our basketball team nearly all-black. Our large Korean student population often feels underappreciated and unrecognized. Our student newspaper, which I advise, recently polled the student body about race relations at our school. I found it very interesting that black and white students both felt that our school's race relations were much better than elsewhere.
For the past two years, I have team-taught an honors course in American Studies at Wheeler. It has been the realization of a long-time goal of mine. My academic work and my teacher training has been primarily in history: I am one thesis away from my master's degree in history at Georgia State. My partner is the history teacher in our classroom, however, while I teach literature. I love it. I especially love teaching literature by exploring the relationship between a text and its historical context. I have changed my thinking about my teaching tremendously over the past few years, largely because I have "historicized" everything that I teach. In my own studies and as a teacher, I question the legitimacy of the structure of American literature as it has been understood in the past and disseminated in the present. Most of my favorite classroom activities encourage students to question the genres of the past: to experience the limits of genre firsthand as writers and to identify the expectations of genre that they have (consciously and subconsciously) as modern readers.
I expect this summer institute to push me to new understandings of "the making of American literature:; I am anxious to explore new areas where we might consider how our collective literature came to be.
I also co-advise our school's journalism department. While this endeavor is not terribly relevant to my goals for this summer institute, I would be remiss not to mention it in my own biography. I love the challenge of motivating my students to create the best publications they can, and I derive some of my greatest satisfaction from seeing my student journalists grow into your adults. I often recruit these young people as ninth graders and get the pleasure of working with them for four years.
Email: jackfrost@peachnet.campus.mci.net
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