I’m American, and as you may know, we love talking about ourselves, so here we go: I was born on a partly cloudy day in May, as the wind swept over the Midwestern plain...(similar content has been omitted for sake of space). I got my M.A. in Applied Linguistics and TESOL from Old Dominion University in Virginia, USA in 2012 and haven’t been the same since. I taught both university and middle school students in the United States and Turkey, a fascinating country which I am always glad to talk more about. My academic interests are rooted in principles of education, language and culture, which I always try to relate to my teaching, leading to questions like these: How do people learn languages? What are good ways to teach languages? What are good ways to teach anything? How does our culture affect the way we learn a language? How does our culture affect the way we learn in general?

Some of the topics I’ve enjoyed researching and exploring in my teaching are: post-structural theories of education, flipped learning, inductive approaches, task-based language teaching, constructive uses of technology in language learning and education in general, the power of music and poetry in language teaching, cultural dimensions, multiple intelligences, writing in a second language…the list goes on and on. A not-so-well kept secret of teachers is that we are voracious learners. We teach in part because teaching is one of the best ways of learning…

If we look at Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, we see that creativity is the highest demonstration of mastery of anything we learn. I always encourage creativity in the classroom, just as I engage my creativity daily in my teaching. Getting students to be creative when they may have been discouraged, sometimes repeatedly, from doing so in the past is my greatest challenge – one I meet with relish. There is an integral relationship between creativity, learning, and play – if we stop playing, we stop learning.

To this end, when I’m not working, eating, or sleeping I’m playing! My hobbies include playing guitar, singing and songwriting, running and hiking, writing poetry and daydreaming, brewing beer and playing computer games. I’m always searching for the newest thing because it keeps me young, and there’s no better job for this than teaching, as our students always teach us so much…as the great sage Laozi once said, “[A teacher] has no interests of his own, but takes the interests of the people as his own.” I’ll never give up my own interests, I’m afraid, but what matters to my students matters to me, and I’ll never hesitate to let them know.