• When did you start teaching?

I started teaching in 1999 in Ghana and in college at Eastern Michigan, then Wayne State, then Cleveland and then here.

• What influenced you to become a teacher?

I had some really excellent professors as an undergrad. I had one political science teacher, Dr. Henderson in my freshman year. He had my sister in college, but even in high school I went to political lectures at my sister’s college because he’d invite her little brother down. I thought that was really cool. He was in your face, challenging, but he was also really funny. He was brilliant. I had another professor, who taught bible and drama, Dr. Bill Khure. He came in the first day and was dressed in overalls; I thought he was the janitor. He played music every day and that’s why I do in my classes. I had his class with my wife, so Bill was one of our mutual mentors.
I was a high school education major and I saw the testing stuff coming down the pike and I thought, if I’m genuinely going to teach, college would be the only place in which I would be able to do it. I had to change my major in my senior year and add another year to my undergrad to get a Liberal Arts degree. I could go on to teach whatever, in six different disciplines. I wanted to teach.

• How did you get involved in the honor’s program?

I’ve done directed studies in the past. I started my first year I was here. I think because of my doctoral program, doing the great works program, it seemed like a natural fit. I tried teaching it in the past; it’s just that the schedules never met up. This was the perfect time; I was at the end of my program in my own school, so it’s not as hard to reread all these books. I also got involved through one of my mentors, who participated in the honor’s program.

• Is teaching Great Works end up being like what you expected it to be?

For the most part it’s gone as expected. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the level of conversation. I’ve been more than pleasantly surprised by the deeper umbrella questions asked; just philosophical bombs that students drop in the middle of class that I continue to think about days later. I learn every semester from my students, but I’ve been more philosophically challenged in this class.

• What do you consider the greatest work?

I think it’s the bible, simply because of the amount of allusions, the tropes, the archetypes. If you understand three of those stories, you understand every story. The bible didn’t invent them, but it was the first one to popularize them, or at least hold them sacred. I can’t think of any other stories that people would kill themselves or kill over.