Jessica Hoffman (she/her) is a Teaching Fellow in English, hailing from Arkansas. Having graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree in English, Hoffman has worked as a writing center coach and volunteered for hundreds of hours in community writing initiatives. At Andover, Hoffman teaches English 200. In her free time, Hoffman enjoys reading, soft pastel art, and playing Catan.
What initially drew you to Andover?
All of the mentors I had in my life in college said teaching is the best job you can do right out of college. It teaches you a lot about patience and forces you to think about what you value most, lesson planning, and developing relationships with people that view you as an authority figure for the first time. I knew I was looking for teaching roles. Out of all the places that I interviewed with or visited, Andover’s English department was the place that felt like I belonged the most. Everybody was super excited to speak with me about what I like to read and write, and what I had read and written. It was also the one school that told me that I could choose anything that I wanted for my curriculum to teach. Having the freedom of the department to choose whatever books or poems or essays that I wanted, and to be able to model my lessons in a way that felt authentic to me, was really important.
How do you help students move from seeing writing as an assignment to seeing it as a form of self-expression or even advocacy?
I want my students not to see me as the authority figure that gives them a grade, but as someone who is also a reader and a writer and is working on my own craft alongside them. Every day in class, when I’m reading their writing, I’m also learning something from them. So I really prioritize feedback in my classes, maybe a little too much. If you move away from seeing writing as something that is getting evaluated, and instead see it as an active co-creation process with your instructor and your peers, it becomes less of a task and more of a personal project. I also don’t really give my students prompts for analytical essays or otherwise. I tell them: write about what you find most interesting in this text, make the argument that you think is most compelling. I don’t want you to respond to what I think is most compelling in a prompt. Allowing them flexibility in both their personal and analytical writing to pursue what they’re most interested in helps a lot too.
You studied English at UNC-Chapel Hill. What was your college experience like?
I actually went into college pre-med, thinking that I wanted to be a doctor, which is hilarious. I sat down with my college advisor in my freshman year, and they were like, “You have enough credits from high school that if you didn’t do a STEM major, you wouldn’t have to take a single math or science class all four years of college.” I was not great at it, nor did I love math or science, but I didn’t really know what else to do. I enrolled in my first-year fall in this creative nonfiction writing class just to get a general English requirement out of the way, and I ended up loving it. It was a 15-person seminar with this really eccentric, awesome creative writing professor. I loved the workshop style, where we were all reading each other’s writing and giving feedback as peers and co-authors. I kind of fell into the English major, and to do a thesis in creative writing, you have to be an English major. I filled the rest of my college years taking English classes like Shakespeare concentrations, British lit concentrations, and African-American lit concentrations.
What’s one common misconception students have about writing or literature that you try to challenge?
I think people who identify as more STEM-oriented think that writing is a side thing that they might not ever be as good at, or that if you don’t have this inherent talent as a writer, you’re not going to succeed. I think writing is so learnable. When people are intimidated by writing, they’re thinking of a very specific style of writing, like standard academic English, the sort of writing that institutions like this and colleges push. I try to show my students that there are all different kinds of writing, all different kinds of ways of speaking through your work, all different kinds of things to write about.
As a Girl Scout Gold Award recipient, you have had a long history with leadership. How has that experience shaped your approach in the classroom?
I created a public writing center in my hometown at a local nonprofit organization, sort of a homeless shelter and resource center. That’s what I got that award for. As far as leadership goes, yes, I came up with that idea and worked a lot to get it to come to fruition, but most of that work was done through the support of and conversations with other people talking to different shelters in Little Rock[, Arkansas], and figuring out who had the capacity to host something. My style of leadership is, I like to get the engine running, but I don’t do anything by myself. It’s similar in teaching. I use their ideas to make something that we’re all proud of and connected to, because we all worked on it together.
You’ve participated in leadership and service experiences in Alaska. How have those diverse environments influenced the way you think about teaching?
Alaska was funny. I did that for 30 days before my freshman year of college. I backpacked with 14 other incoming UNC students, and [though] it was the most out of my comfort zone I’ve ever been, it was great. I learned so much about connecting with nature and also myself. We didn’t have phones for the entire 30 days. I got to know what it means to connect with other people. How quickly you get to know other people when there are no distractions. I [also] got to know myself. I wrote the beginnings of what became my memoir when I was in Alaska, and I journaled a ton and wrote letters home.
What did building a writing center for low-income students teach you about educational equity?
When I built that writing center, I was in high school. The students I was engaging with were exactly my age and were just as smart as me, just as hardworking as me. The only difference was that they didn’t have access to the resources that I had, which was by no means something they deserved. It was really just privilege and luck. There is a negative feedback loop: if you don’t have access to writing support, you don’t think that you’re a good writer, and then you don’t seek out support because there’s this inferiority complex of thinking that your writing isn’t good enough, and you don’t want to show it to other people, so you withdraw. Writing takes a lot of time and practice, and if you’re worried about how you’re going to get to school safely or how you’re going to feed yourself that evening, it’s hard to take an hour of your time to sit with a writing tutor and work on your writing.
You’ve published work on writing centers and tutoring, what inspired you to write them?
A lot of the work that I’ve published on writing centers and tutoring, the primary one was when I realized that a lot of writing centers operate in private institutions. Like our Writing Center at [Andover], it’s fabulous, but it’s only accessible to [Andover] students. So some of the research and work I’ve done in that space is figuring out how we can take those elements of writing centers, that writing coaching, that ongoing process of peer collaboration over writing, and extend that into a public space. How can we make writing centers public? What venues can those kinds of writing tutoring programs operate out of? How do we give students credit for volunteering their time to engage in those kinds of places, so as not to gatekeep the sort of assistance and help that writing centers give?… The other piece I wrote was about my own experience as a writing center coach. When I was in high school, I did not think that I was a good writer. I was like, “I want to do math and STEM and be pre-med, and I’m not a good writer.” I went to a private high school, but I transferred in from a public high school, and I remember my first English paper in ninth grade. I got a 67 on it, and I was just devastated.
You’ve logged hundreds of hours in community writing initiatives, what motivated that level of commitment to literacy and education?
It was very clear to me how much of an educational disparity there can be, especially in the humanities. I have a twin sister, and we went to the same elementary and middle school, but went to different high schools. She got such a different educational experience than I did, in terms of reading and writing. Her public high school didn’t have a writing center open to them. It’s silly that whether you have the money to afford private school, or whether you’re in an area close enough to a school that has a writing center, should determine your confidence in writing and how you perceive reading and writing, and the skills you’re able to build in it. A lot of the work I’ve done in communities is less so about literacy and reading and writing, and more so about storytelling and story sharing a lot of oral history work, especially in Southern Black communities.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I play a lot of Catan. I love trivia. I love to go home to Arkansas to be with my family. I sew with my grandmother a lot. I like cooking with my uncles. We do a lot of fried catfish and crawfish boils. Family time is big. I read a lot, mostly creative nonfiction, like memoir, but I’m also really into historical fiction. I watch The Pitt. It’s a great show. I play guitar when I have time, and then also soft pastel art, which, now that it’s getting nice outside, you’ll probably see me sitting around on a picnic blanket with a bunch of pastels strewn out.
