TUTORIALS, COURSES, & CONSULTATIONS
Academic Coaching, Consultation, and Tutorials
With more than 25 -years of experience in the teaching of writing and literature at the secondary, college, and professional level, I am well versed in helping students of all levels of ability. Offering workshops and tutorials in:
The College and Secondary School Application Essay
Personal Essays
Critical Essays
Poetry Manuscript Consultations
Memoir Manuscript Consultations
General Creative Writing Projects
Literary Analysis
Media Literacy
Through a combination of personalized mentoring, writing strategies, and academic planning I help students find their voice and tell their stories.
Contact me to discuss how we can structure a program to fir your needs or the needs of your students at mattwmiller89@gmail.com.
Sample Tutorial:
The College Essay/Personal Statement Intensive
One-on-One Meetings
· One Hour Zoom Meetings
o Discuss Topics and Interests
o Read and Discuss Example Essays
o Brainstorm
o Outline
o Draft
o Receive Feedback
o Revision Strategies
Instructor Preparation
· Preparation and Asynchronous Consultation
o Student Specific Readings
o Student Specific Brainstorming Exercises
o Drafting Strategies
o Written Feedback and Suggestions for Revision
o Final Submission Ready Review
Workshops for Educators in Discussion Based Learning
Half day, full day, or multiple day professional development workshops in discussion-based, student-centered pedagogy used by schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy. Participants will experience how discussion-based learning builds a classroom and a community that is human focused, that is nurturing to all, and that is empathetic to, and engaged with, multiple points of knowledge.
This workshop will be experiential and hands on. Rather than than sitting through a canned lecture or digital presentation, participants will become students as they read, discuss, and critically analyze texts in a collaborative setting with the goal of working with each other to build knowledge and understanding. Experiencing this process from the inside out, participants will deepen their own skills of critical thinking, oral communication, and active listening as they learn how to bring this pedagogy to their own classrooms, offices, and learning communities.
As your facilitator, I will introduce the concept of discussion-based learning wherein each individual's knowledge and creativity come together to increase the learning of the whole group. I will offer suggestions of ways to generate discussion, how to embrace mistakes and missteps rather than avoid them, and to show participants that there is not a one-size-fits all method to discussion-based learning.
I will observe and analyze participants' discussions in order to generate collegial conversations about the philosophy and practicalities of this pedagogy. As well, I am able to offer workshops on other topics such as teaching poetry, critical writing, assessment, and generative writing and even methods of employing this pedagogy in STEM classes.
Participants should expect a warm, inclusive, and fun environment in which teachers engage (or re-engage) in the professional joy of teaching and the personal fulfillment inherent to learning from each other.
For more details, contact me at mattwmiller89@gmail.com.
Haunting and the Haunted: Finding and Honing the Poetry of Place
How do we use image, language, form, and sound to set down our towns, our neighborhoods, and the cities we live in such a way that words capture the truth of a place? How do we resist sentimentality while perhaps welcoming a place’s own particular mythology? Tyler Malone has written, “The city resists being seen as pure architecture or pure activity. We mistake the city if we take it for mere setting or plot. The city is character; it breathes its own life, speaks in its own tongue, moves to its own rhythms.” In this workshop we will write, workshop, revise and research to craft poems that attempt to find the breath, the language, the music and character of the places that make us, that break us, that create us through our own survival. We will read poets such as Richard Hugo, Major Jackson, Natasha Tretheway, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Alberto Rios and explore the ways in and out of the places that haunt us and in which we, as poets, haunt.
Tiny Tales, Prose Poems, and Micro Memoirs
This class will wade into those estuaries where the waters of genre blend and mingle and birth something new. We will try to blend the lyrical intensity of the poem with the narrative movement of the story as well as the wandering discovery of the essay. We will write untethered from the poetic line yet bound by the infinite space of a nutshell all while traveling on the turtle back of the sentence. We will question how much we owe the facts and how much we owe to truth and what perhaps is the difference between the two. The work we will produce will be short yet will hopefully contain the arc of human existence, the universe squeezed into a ball. We will read Carolyn Forche, Robert Hass, Julia Alvarez, Andre Dubus, Margaret Atwood and others; each student will receive an email appraising their work at the end of the class, offering suggestions for further reading and revision.
The Lyrical Littoral: The Sea as a Source for Poetry
“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul,” says Ishmael in the opening pages of Moby Dick, “I account it is high time to get to water as soon as I can.” In this generative workshop we will do just that, get to the water, at least with our words. We will look at the sea, specifically the littoral zone of the Atlantic coast, as a source for language, image, experience, metaphor, and inspiration. We will consider the sea as our shared biosphere where fishermen grind out a living on dwindling catches, where surfers slip into winter wetsuits to take on Nor’easter swells, where summer sandcastles topple with the tide, and where lovers hold out for the promise of sunrise. Taking a look at sea inspired poems and culling from our intimate relationship with water, we will then generate and share poems of our own.