Sometimes I get a little bored teaching. After a while of teaching the same stuff and not getting anywhere and feeling like you're wasting my time on some of these kids, it starts to make you a little weary. And I really just want to be home writing.
I decided that this semester I'm going to go with what I know best and feel most confident teaching: creative writing.
I have two sections of Contemporary Composition, which normally I teach by reading some literature and using as a basis for a couple of expository essays. But one of the problems I've faced is that it takes so long to get through the reading material because most of my kids are at an eighth grade reading level that I don't have enough time to get to the writing, which is supposed to be the focus of the class.
But this semester I decided to use only a couple of short stories for examples and focus more on writing. I'm starting with what makes something a story.
In the beginning I was going to make their first assignment an autobiographical story. Then came yesterday, when I had them make up a character and give him goals and obstacles and we created a story. And the story was good. And the kids have fun making it.
And I realized I may have something here.
So today we read "Story of an Hour" and discussed how to develop character without taking up eight pages of description. Now I'm using a character chart I stole from a screenwriter and the kids are making up a character by filling it out.
Then they're going to develop that character into the protagonist for their story that they will write over the next week.
It appears to be working. Granted, right now they look more like they're doing their math homework than having fun making up a person. But that could also be because it's 8:20 in the morning.
For years I've had a dream to teach creative writing to convicts. When I finally get my screenwriting career going and I make good money and have flexible hours, I want to teach a class for prisoners who want to learn to write stories. I'd do it for free and only for prisoners who volunteer for the class and are not rapists or just really creepy.
Since some of my students will likely be prisoners, this is kind of like a dry run.
Badump-ching!
Just kidding. Most of my students will not be prisoners again. Probably. No, seriously. They're great kids.
Anyway, I don't feel as depressed going to school in the morning these days because I'm teaching what I really love to people who are running with their creative ideas. I look forward to seeing where they go with them.
1) The kids writing a story sounds great.
ReplyDelete2) You have strange dreams.
-Bill
A fun easy and useful exercise we used in first year creative writing class:
ReplyDeleteProf comes in, writes eight or nine seemingly random words on the board, and we had fifteen minutes to write one-pager using all eight words in whatever manner we liked. We then took turns reading the stories aloud.
The fun thing here is that no mention is made of "acts" or any other classical structural terminology-- just tell a story, quickly, using these random pieces tossed out there.
You could even use first few minutes of class time for group brainstorming using a set of random terms, showing the kids just how creatively they can snap together their few textual tinkertoys to get wildly different components.
Then scribble out a new set of random terms and have them work against the clock for the final 10 minutes.
If done right, this feels less like writing and more like a poetry slam-- something quick and impromptu.
And you get a class full of papers to judge for once. You could read some of the best papers to the class, or maybe go so far as to show the papers in an overhead projector, with the assigned words highlighted to compare visually how and where different people use these same assigned words.
I've done something similar to that as a poetry exercise, but never used it to write stories. Sounds like an interesting exercise. I'll give it a shot.
ReplyDelete