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Zachary Wiser is a new adjunct professor at Grand View that teaches English and Business Communications classes. He also teaches at Drake and DMACC, and teaches a yoga class in his free time.

“I got my 200 hour registration to teach yoga last spring. I’ve been teaching for probably 50 hours, so I’m fairly new to that, but it’s something that I really love and a different kind of teaching,” Wiser said.

Wiser comes from a family of teachers. His dad was an elementary P.E. teacher, his mother, elementary art, and his grandfathers were high school teachers in science and choir. Despite his family being made sup of educators, he did not originally want to become one.

“They didn’t want me to go into teaching. It was kind of a ‘don’t take over the family business’ thing. But they’re not upset that I teach, they love that I teach,” Wiser said.

He decided to start teaching after going to graduate school and being an assistant teacher.

“Within two weeks of teaching those first two classes in graduate school, I knew, ‘oh I love this. This is something I really want to pursue’” Wiser said.

His mother graduated from Boulder High School in Colorado and was around during the hippie movement of the 60’s, though she wasn’t a hippie herself. They would often go hiking in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

“Middle of nowhere, survival style camping with everything in backpacks for weeks on end. I grew up every summer doing that,” Wiser said.

She raised her son in a meditative practice that has influenced a lot of his life decisions and his deep spiritual connection to nature.

“We are all a spiritual vibration momentarily experiencing physical manifestation,” Wiser said.

Despite his mother living in Colorado for a good portion of her life, Wiser did not actually go to Colorado until last summer for vacation with his son. He promised his son that when he turned five, he would take him to see a mountain, so they went on a trip to Estes Park in Colorado.

“That was a really special bonding experience for my son and I” said Wiser. “Because being in the mountains in that context is part of my self-identity and my spiritual awakening so it was really cool to share that with him.”

Wiser’s unconventional upbringing also tends to helps his teaching process.

“That really comes from my sitting practice of meditation, that I can turn off the ego just enough to see how everyone is processing the information,” Wiser said. “And to me that is just a special and almost magical process.”

Wiser has a different approach to teaching, rooted in critical thinking.

“Teaching writing is teaching critical thinking. Teaching students how to think for themselves. It’s an opportunity to make mistakes, but a safe space to try different aspects” Wiser said. “The job of a student is to ask and question everything and get the toolkit to turn that process of questioning into a career.”

Before teaching, Wiser was a part of LitReactor, an online writing workshop and magazine which was originally founded by the creators of ChuckPalahniuk.net (a fansite for the author of Fight Club). Wiser also reads a lot of books including titles by Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Irvine Welsh and Philip K. Dick, among many others.

“Books are my friends” Wiser said.

One of his favorite quotes is a quote from a Stephen King book called On Writing. The quote says, “the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

“That’s the mindset you have to have if you’re gonna try to keep writing” Wiser said.

Wiser has had some creative writing work published, including short stories, one of which will be coming out on October 3rd this year in the online journal Literary Orphans.

“The great thing about college is academic freedom. I really approach everyone from the classroom perspective of ‘I have this information and in the process of sharing it with you, I hope to learn something about all of you from engaging, that I didn’t know before.’”