teaching style

no, not that kind—I wouldn't be able to get my certificate for that. I spent my 135-minute class today teaching writing style, and to a lesser extent grammar, to my first-year writing students. I have a "Bad Sentences Worksheet" of examples culled from real student writing (specifically, papers from my students four jobs ago) and we corrected/revised a bunch of them. It took almost the whole class just to get through 15. This actually impressed me: nobody even fell asleep, and the students came up with some great suggestions. I've been having a crisis of confidence about my abilities as a classroom writing teacher, so I was happy about this.

Then two of my grad students told me about how they use—really well, I'd add—an old Chris Farley SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE clip to teach rhetoric and argumentation, and I felt like hiding under the desk. Does innovation belong only to the un-Ph.D.'ed?