Daniel Coupland

About

During Christmas break of my junior year in college, I had a professional crisis. I was almost finished with my undergraduate experience, and I didn’t know what I was going to do for a living.

I was curious about a lot of things, and I could see myself doing any number of jobs. My father suggested that I take an Education class because he thought I would be a good teacher. I thought he was wrong, but I took the class anyway.

The course itself was dull, but the instructor required all the students spend ten hours observing in a real classroom. I began the observation hours still convinced that teaching was not for me, but by the end of the two days of observing, I was hooked. In fact, I was convinced that I would be a teacher for the rest of my life.

I’ve been teaching at Hillsdale since 2006, and I strive to communicate what it means to be genuinely human. I have the opportunity and freedom to do what all professors should do: teach. As a friend once told me, good teaching is the overflow of a full life. In my classes, I therefore try to fill my students’ lives with as much goodness, truth, and beauty as I can.

The undergraduate years are over in a flash, so in the Education program at Hillsdale we offer students the ability to spend four years studying the best of what has been thought, said, and written.