SUPPORT THIS PODCAST: CLICK HERE
Andrew Katz is an English and creative writing teacher at Dawson College and the author of several children's book including: How To Catch A Bear Who Loves To Read, I Just Want To Be Super! and the upcoming A Starlit Trip to the Library. He shares the joy he experiences in the process of finding just the right word and muses about humans' metaphorical minds. We discuss how his experience of remote teaching during COVID lifted a curtain for him on the inequality among his students and explains how he tweaked his teaching approach to take into account his students' needs.
“When people are in the middle of a pandemic, you cannot just launch into the subject of the day as if everything is normal. That would be like if you're in some kind of disaster situation and you just pretend it's not happening. You have to acknowledge the situation that we're all in. The way I structured my class is the first half hour was optional. It was like hanging out. So people would just come in if they felt like it, half an hour of hanging out and another 15 minutes of small groups just to get the pulse of everyone and just to kind of ease into being together in this online space. And I think once they feel like you're aware that we're in a storm, that there's water sloshing over the side of the boat, that they feel very alone and scared, once they're like, 'oh, he's aware that I'm in this situation, now I'm okay to learn about English and creative writing.'”
---
SUPPORT THIS PODCAST: CLICK HERE
---
Andrew Katz
WEB http://andrewkatzbooks.ca
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-katz-2922b63a
---
AND SOMETIMES ... WHY?:
WEB https://www.andsometimeswhy.com
EMAIL mailto:andsometimeswhypod@gmail.com
INSTA https://www.instagram.com/andsometimeswhypod
FB https://www.facebook.com/andsometimeswhypod
TWEET https://twitter.com/sometimeswhypod
