Fun-damentals

Professor takes an entertaining approach to education

By DONNA CRARY

For Professor David Muller, teaching English composition at Indian River State College involves the usual reading and writing — as well as lots of fun. 

“I want students to have a good time in my classroom,” Muller said. “I want them to enjoy it. I want them — forgive me for saying — to be slightly amused and entertained. If they want to be in the room and if they’re having a good time, they’re probably going to remember what you’re teaching them.”

In Muller’s ENC 1101 class, he assigns a campus tour paper, where students are required to walk around the Chastain Campus. As part of the assignment, students are asked to take selfies, pictures of the campus’ landscape, a picture sitting upside down on a bench, then write a personal narrative that includes a dialogue. While the assignment may seem a bit unconventional, Muller says there’s a reason for this approach. 

“If I look at my college transcripts, there are whole classes I don’t remember taking because I took so many of them,” he explained. “But the ones I do remember, I remember because the educator was really a charismatic person, or you could tell he or she really cared about their topic. They brought that passion, and I was thus able to learn. But there are other educators that I remember again when I look at my transcripts, and I remember one class in particular that was so painfully boring. I remember that 30 years later. So I say to myself, ‘I teach composition, and it’s not the most exciting course content, and I’m going to go out of my way to try to make it not boring like that.’”

Muller was born on a Navy base in Portsmouth, Virginia. At the time, his parents were serving in the military. His father was a Cornell-educated, fifth-generation doctor and his mother worked as a nurse in the emergency room. His father made the Navy his career, so Muller grew up living in a variety of places including Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Okinawa, Japan; and London. He spent his high school years in a small town called Horseheads, New York. 

After graduating high school, Muller moved to Los Angeles and attended American Jewish University — then known as the University of Judaism — to prepare to become a rabbi. While in college, he switched his major to political science and minored in Jewish studies. He also changed his mind about becoming a rabbi, and later, pursued graduate work in an English-related field.

While working on his bachelor’s degree, Muller had jobs at various places including a religious school at Temple Israel of Hollywood, where he taught Hebrew to elementary students. 

“What I can say about that is, if you ever want to be an educator and had to successfully manage a third grade classroom, the things and tricks you learn in that third grade classroom are going to come in later, when you teach undergraduates,” he said. 

After completing his undergraduate work, Muller moved to Israel, where he received a master’s degree in Hebrew literature with a focus on creative writing, from Bar-Ilan University. 

EARLY CAREER

While looking back on those earlier days, Muller says that his teaching journey began in earnest after completing his master’s, when he taught English as a second language at Hebrew University in Israel. There, he was involved in the Yachad Accelerated Learning Project, which used accelerated learning as a technique to teach English. 

Muller worked for Hebrew University for about five years. During that time, he routinely traveled from Israel to Australia where he taught English to Aboriginal groups in elementary and secondary schools. He worked in Adelaide in South Australia as well as Alice Springs located in the Northern Territory of Australia. 

Between pursuing his master’s and doctorate degrees, Muller wanted to try out a new career — away from the classroom. Since he enjoyed reading and writing, he moved back to the United States and took a stab at line editing manuscripts for a publishing company in New York City. 

“I remember I rented an apartment and then took the subway down, and all of that was exciting,” he recalled. “But then I got to my cubicle, and almost immediately, I was like, ‘This is not the right fit.’ I learned how to do line editing there. I also learned, more importantly, this was not the right career path for me.”

After working in publishing for a year, Muller moved back to Australia and earned his doctorate in creative writing from Monash University. While working on his doctorate, he began to lay the foundation for teaching as a career. 

“It was part of our contract that we had to teach undergraduate classes,” Muller explained. “So I jumped in. Anytime a professor needed someone to teach, I would raise my hand because I wanted to come out the other end with the experience of having run several successful classrooms, in the hope and assumption that’s what my skill would be wherever I ended up getting a job. Being in the classroom working with young people — that’s where the magic is. That’s where the live action is. That’s where the interaction is. And that’s really what I wanted to do.”

ESSENTIAL SKILLS 

As an English professor, Muller instructs his students how to analyze literature, as well as how to write essays and other forms of composition. Oftentimes, students at the beginning of his class are unsure how to put pen to paper. During the semester, however, he says they develop a skill set that can carry them throughout their lives.

“I believe if you can conquer the skill about The Devil Wears Prada, or about the film Coco, or about Somerset Maugham’s The Poet; if you can go through the procedures to come to a level of understanding about this text to produce something of an intelligent nature on paper; if you can conquer that, then two years from now, when the professor says, ‘I need you to learn this,’ you’re going to employ those same tactics,” he explained. “What you produce might be different. You might produce a presentation or an oral exam. You might not produce an essay. But the skills that you’re going to use to get to that level of understanding are things that you can learn here.”

To build academic success, Muller uses technology and incorporates it into his curriculum. He sends students emails on a weekly basis, reminding them of what material will be covered for that week. In the emails, the professor includes PowerPoint slides, videos, and jpegs to keep students informed. He says this helps them to stay on top of their assignments.

“We all know that a young person is glued to their phone,” he noted. “The minute we take it away, they experience anxiety. I use all of the technologies that I possibly can so my stuff is on all of their screens. It works out for most students because they’re looking at their phone. They rely on this device, and it’s so central.”

In his classes, Muller’s instruction includes how to write a cover letter. He says it is key to helping students be prepared when entering the workforce.

“I make every student write one,” he said. “I show them how I found my jobs, and there’s some places that have websites and that kind of thing. I don’t focus on it a lot because that’s not my primary task of composition. It’s a parting gift in my class because they’re not going to have to write an essay. But they’re going to have to go out into the field and write at least one cover letter.”

As Muller reflects on his two years of working at IRSC, he highlights how much he loves working at the Chastain Campus in Stuart. Its compact size allows him to be better connected to his students and the staff who help support his classes. He enjoys working with the caliber of students who are enrolled in his classes and hopes to inspire them to continue their education. And mostly he enjoys teaching and is pleased when his students come to a level of understanding, where they critically think for themselves.

“When I see a student later on in the semester or afterwards hovering in the halls, sometimes they follow me to another class,” he said. “They say, ‘I hardly remember anything about The Devil Wears Prada, but I remember the process that I undertook there. So now, when I walk into my science class and the professor says that today we’re going to learn about the femur, I go, “Okay, I know that’s a bone, but I don’t know what it does or anything like that.” Well, I now know what process I can undertake to figure out what that damn thing is all about.’ ”

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PROFESSOR DAVID MULLER

School: Indian River State College

Age: 47

Family: single

Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, now known as American Jewish University; master’s degree in Hebrew literature with an emphasis in creative writing from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel; doctorate in creative writing from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia 

Background: Taught English as a Second Language at Hebrew University in Israel and Australia; instructor of English Composition at Clayton State University, Georgia Southern University, and Valdosta State University

How I got into teaching: “Before and after that stint in New York publishing, I realized that outside of/in addition to writing, the other things I could do was [1] work in publishing, or [2] teach — but teach college-aged students and not little kids. I had a thought I would not like the New York part of “New York publishing,” and when the PhD came around, I threw myself into tertiary teaching.”

What I like best about teaching: “I think it’s the knowledge that if students walk into my classroom and don’t exactly know how to be a college student, they walk out knowing how to be a better college student. That’s something that I think happens by default in my class. They walk out of my room, and I think they feel better about what they’re trying to do in life and better equipped on how to make that happen.”

Something my students probably don’t know about me: “I may or may not have doctored a Scantron to pass a science class back at that Jewish school in California.