Bob Mayberry

UnTeaching Bob Mayberry

The odyssey of one writing teacher from traditional methods of teaching college composition, including marking papers and grading students, to "unteaching," a reconsideration of how we learn, and discussion of the changes that can bring about in how we teach. The book is part memoir, part research, part anecdote, part analysis. It examines how we learn to read and write and swim, and highlights the best practices available for teaching those behaviors. Master teachers are offered as models, and swimming lessons scrutinized for what they reveal about learning to write. The author's personal experiences, struggles and failures as both a writing and swimming teacher reveal what is wrong with contemporary approaches, and from those experiences the author assembles a varied collection of unusual, non-traditional, anti-institutional methods collectively called "Unteaching."