Mr. Sinnott has been teaching for 15 years. He first started teaching in the Fall of 2008 at Auburn High School, his old high school. He taught AP Lang for a year there before getting married and moving to Birmingham. Since he grew up around books and his parents were always reading, he has always loved to read and write. He truly values his upbringing around books.
The people who stepped into his life after his father’s passing during the spring of his eighth grade year were the people who became his English teachers for his junior and senior year of high school. He says these younger male English teachers really influenced and inspired him to go into teaching. Additionally, he was active in his high school and college band. His band teachers were also influential on him. He believes it was really all his teachers, particularly his male English teachers, who stepped in and guided him to his profession. He felt called to the profession due to his love of reading and writing. He never had AP Lang as an option to take during his high school years, so it was a brand new experience for him. He loved AP Lang because it is different from a typical English class; it is a class that is mostly nonfiction, argument, and rhetoric based. He particularly enjoyed the process of “filling in the gaps” that may have been addressed in other English classes but may not have had the same focus that AP Lang does.
He describes his class as a class that is “everything and nothing” because the content is whatever he and his students want it to be. It is a class about learning how to work with a certain set of skills and evaluating and crafting arguments. It is a place where students constantly practice and develop their skills as a writer. He hopes that his class can be seen as a place that fosters growth and rewards risk taking. He wants his classroom to be a place that is comfortable for all students: where students feel seen as an individual.
He is grateful for the opportunity to get to know his students and develop them as writers. He enjoys getting to see his students become a community. He believes that learning to write and communicate effectively is an important and empowering skill. He knows that no matter what his students grow to become, they will become even more successful in their careers if they know how to write effectively. He says that getting to work on that skill with his students is one of his favorite things about teaching AP Lang.
As an English teacher, Mr. Sinnott loves reading. He reads everything from “serious literature” to science fiction and fantasy. He feels that students should read what they’re interested in. In addition to the books required for school reading, Mr. Sinnott would recommend books by the author Becky Chambers to students. Chambers is a fantasy writer, and her work is not only interesting, but also accessible. He says that those interested in science fiction should check out some of her work. There are also many books that Mr. Sinnott would love to teach in AP Lang if the class had time for that. One of those books is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. It is a story about fly-fishing in Montana and brothers and loss. He believes that it is a beautiful novella, and he wishes he had the opportunity to teach it.
Mr. Sinnott along with Mr. Osborne from the freshman campus started the high school’s Sci-Fi Fantasy Club. This club provides the club members the opportunity to share their interests and cross into the world that is fantasy and science fiction.
As Mr. Sinnott claims, reading and writing are important skills. When practiced, these skills become much better. He believes that one of the best things a student can do is to try to become readers “inside and outside of the classroom.” He wants students to seek out things that they love. He believes there is not such a thing as “bad reading” as long as one is reading. He asks his students to cultivate a reading life and practice those skills. He believes a good tip for English students is to make reading a habit, so these skills can become much easier
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