Broadly speaking, I think that instructors mostly resemble each other in their teaching. This fact is unavoidable. By the time students reach college they have had over a decade of experience in classrooms: they have expectations and for the most part the reciprocal side of those expectations are also held by the instructor gratefully, I might add. However, there is room also for the individual human factor to come into play. In this regard, in teaching English literature and composition, I emphasize two approaches that may lie a bit outside a student’s immediate expectations. In teaching literature, I want to help the student achieve increased discernment, toward the splendors (and miseries) of imagination and inspiration as this pertains to their understanding of life going on around them, and not to just what is on the printed page. With composition my approach tends to be unconventional, even eccentric: the goal is to help students establish an absolute confidence in their own innate approach to writing by alerting them to look a bit beyond the writing assignment’s content to fulfilling the reader’s expectation of clarity