Dr. Boehnen on Writing, Mentorship, and Emotional Intelligence | Season 3, Ep 4

<p>In Episode 4 of Season Three of <em>The Late Start Show</em>, we sit down with Dr. Scott Boehnen, Assistant Director of College Counseling, longtime English teacher, and member of the US faculty since 2012. Dr. Boehnen takes us back to snow days in Fairview Park and to Mrs. Elrick, the sarcastic English teacher who told him his first college essay &quot;made me wanna vomit&quot; and then helped him find his own voice in a new draft that opened with &quot;I am a beagle.&quot; He also talks about becoming a first-generation college student at Notre Dame, where he nearly ended up a Japanese and business major on arena scheduling day. From there he went to a Stanford PhD and wrote his 350-page dissertation in a single summer, mailing chapters to his advisor by FedEx and finally printing the last 10,000 words from a floppy disk at Kinko&#39;s just before the deadline.</p><p><br></p><p>From six years teaching in London, where a student who now holds a lifetime chair at Oxford taught him to look for the outlier as well as the pattern, to a Westchester school that stops everything every Friday afternoon so the whole school can write in blue books, Dr. Boehnen explains how he came to see himself as a writing teacher first. He reflects on finding his way to US, learning every boy&#39;s name before the first day, and the brotherhood he saw right away. He also explains why AI led him to step back from teaching English: he couldn&#39;t find a way to protect the essay or the mentoring relationship built around it. Dr. Boehnen shares the story of a student he had never taught who showed him what emotional intelligence and courage really look like. To close, he describes his &quot;why&quot;: the privilege of being invited into a boy&#39;s life at its most important turning points.</p><p><br></p><p>Credits to Theo Walter for Production and Editing, Russ Nobles for the Intro and Outro songs, Mr. Wickboldt for being our advisor, and you for listening to our podcast and keeping up with the latest US news.</p>