Jeff House

I taught for 35 years in public schools around the state in suburban and small town settings. I have a BA in Journalism and an MA in English Literature, taking most of my coursework at San Jose State University. I've experimented with teaching environments, having taught learning disabled, mainstream, and honors students in traditional and interdepartmental courses. My studies over the last decade in mythology, American culture and writing led to published articles in English Journal and other periodicals and the creation of several websites for teachers and students. My Writing is Dialogue: Why Our Students Write Backwards and How We can Fix Them, a writing text drawn from classroom experiences and much of the material used in my lectures on teaching writing, was published in March of 2006. In 2012 I finished a ten-year labor of love, an investigation into how to approach literature through archetypes, entitled Below the Moon. The recipient of seven NEH grants, I've traveled across the continent a few times in the study of African-American literature, early eighteenth-century American and British lit; humanities and the Renaissance; Medieval Germanic epics; and Shakespeare. Finally, I've lectured for the College Board, the California Association of Teachers of English, the California Association for Independent Schools, and the San Diego-based AVID, and I'm a consultant for the San Jose Area Writing Project. After three margaritas, I've been known to pull out my guitar and sing 60s protest songs, so I drink moderately.