Teacher Spotlight: Dr. Kerr
Dr. Kerr is loved by all of his students, both for his encouraging and fun personality, and his incredible academic insight. Co-editor Zaid Badiger learns more about Dr. Kerr in the interview below.
Pixel Journal: How did you decide to become a teacher at OHS?
Dr. Kerr: That’s an interesting question because I’ve been at the OHS since the beginning, making this my 11th year. I was the second hire, after Dr. Scarborough, while I was finishing up my PhD at Stanford and had done some teaching in the English Department and at Summer Institutes for EPGY. My goal for my PhD was to read and write in the fields I enjoyed: experimental poetry and poetics and Buddhism and Buddhist writing in the United States. I didn’t have any ambitions of becoming a scholar, but I fell into teaching at the OHS, and discovered it was a good place to explore literature and writing. It was exciting to see how the school developed, and what the teachers and students did to make this a great place. Students at the OHS have always been fantastic, and every year they have made teaching here – to quote Mark Twain’s Huck Finn – an adventure in good style. Another benefit is that being able to work from home has been a good thing in terms of balancing health and life. I have multiple sclerosis so being at home most days helps me balance issues I have with the disease with my heavy workload as an instructor. It’s been a good fit for quite a long time, and I’m quite happy with it.
PJ: Why did you decide to teach English and literature specifically? What most interests you about the subject?
DK: I’ve always been interested in writing and literature, even before I really knew what it was. Going back a long time to when I was a kid in elementary school, I was curious about writing and what a life with books would be like. What does a writer do when he is not writing? A life of writing and books for me has meant getting a PhD, teaching at the OHS, and living, paying my bills, as a literature instructor. It has also meant encouraging and interviewing other writers and finding out what it means to them to write. If we look at the new creative writing classes, I’m pleased to say they have been successful, and the courses will continue and hopefully expand to include more types of writing, and for all students at the OHS. (My hope is to have creative writing classes for the middle school in the new future.)
PJ: You’ve been at the OHS for 11 years, met many different types of students, and seen what works and what doesn’t. Based on your experience, what is one piece of advice you would give to OHS students?
DK: I’ve seen a lot of students come into the OHS at different stages, and their transition from a traditional school to the OHS has been quite intriguing. There have been some students who have found that this isn’t the right place for them, but this is the exception, as most students find a place and enjoy it. I think too we’re improving as a school in locating students who have harder times adjusting to this environment. We have much inclusive values than we have had in the past, and are aware that we need to keep improving. My advice to most students echoes the wonderful speech given by Jango McCormick at graduation last spring. Jango could hit great insights I remember in University Level Literature studying Moby-Dick or Photography. What he said was that we as a school have to be particularly active in communicating with each other because this is an online high school. We don’t bump into each other in the hallways. We are not in physical proximity. Active communication with your instructors and classmates is the extra step or two that helps to pull together the online community, pulls each of us into that community.
As an English teacher, I would advise writers to write well and have fun. I like to quote John Cage on this as he said, “I’ve got nothing to say, and I’m saying it.” I like this quote because it displays how much there is to say about the things we come across in everyday life. A student who is blocked in an assignment will benefit from reading, writing, and conversation – office hours and Skype groups. The talking with friends and instructors is part of a process to talk your way out of a block. Perhaps it is to delve into deeper meanings as we might say in Modes of Writing and Argumentation. (This year’s sections in MWA are especially adventurous. It’s been great.) Yet that nothing Cage toys with has another connotation. I take it as the freedom to explore what can be said. At the OHS we are rigorous instructors and students who can write college level arguments and perform fantastic analysis on texts. We also have writers who find doors and windows, new perspectives, that were not there before until someone did some writing – poems, short fiction, blogging, an essay analyzing Kamau Brathwaite’s poetics for Dr. Dawkins, or an essay for Dr. Nunnery showing us that the eyebrows we missed before matter if we want to understand Art Speigelman’s Maus. I’d give some examples from my classes, but I want to stop with this picture what involves other instructors in the English Division. It points to the good work going on with many students and many instructors.
PJ: What does your life look like outside of school?
DK: I work an awful lot during the school year, that’s for sure, but outside of that it looks a lot like a regular family life. I have two sons, aged 12 and 17. I spend a lot of time with my 12-year-old who is currently in middle school, and my older son who is going through the college application process. I’ve experienced the college application process with many students in the past, but now it’s exciting – that might be code for “stressful” – to see my son going through it! My wife is also an English teacher, and I’m lucky because I get to talk to her about teaching and pedagogy. She’s a smart cookie. Spending time with my family is a way for me to take a break from work. If I add anything else, I would say I travel. I find that whenever I have time, I like to travel to go visit friends. I’m fond of Ezra Pound’s quotation in his Cantos or Arthur Waley’s translation of Confucius. The quote goes something like this: “It’s good to have friends visit from far away places.” I like to be that friend doing that visiting; or, too I like to be the friend welcoming that visitor in my home.
PJ: Who are your favorite writers? Favorite texts? If you could meet your favorite writers, what would you ask them?
DK: I don’t feel like I have favorites but there are writers that I would return to often. I return to Moby-Dick and other writings by Melville, and another favorite that I teach at OHS is Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Teaching it along with photography and modernism has been a great boon in the last few years. I enjoy contemporary poets such as Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, and Nathaniel Mackey. These are poets that aren’t very popular and not many people know about them, but I’ve met them and like to keep up with their major writing projects. Maybe it’s like keeping up with a sports team or something. There was a while – when I was an editor of a literary journal "Mantis" at Stanford – where I was interviewing many current writers, as I like to look at writers who have been writing for a while or the younger ones who are working at what it means to be a writer in the United States. I’ve done interviews with poets that are fun to mention (they are good memories) such as Czeslaw Milosz, who was a Nobel prize winner, his friend and colleague, Robert Hass, a U.S Poet Laureate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo, Robert Creeley, and Lyn Hejinian. I’m interested in finding out why writers write. If I could get a hold of an older writer, I would ask if it was worth living a life with writing. I would be interested to see how they define the word “worth,” and whether they want to put “worth living” together with writing.
PJ: What is the funniest thing that has ever happened to you?
DK: Gosh, I don’t know what to say for this one! I think I might not even be able to say some of the silliest things. I think it would be when I lived in Japan for a few years. People would ask me to sing and dance, and if you saw me sing and dance, you’d think it was a funny thing too. I know I was awfully worried when students had filmed me dancing at a prom a few years back! I’ve always wanted to be a song and dance man like Fred Astaire so I really didn’t want to see how badly I dance!
PJ: Thanks, Dr. Kerr!
Edited for clarity and length.