So tomorrow is my first official day of teaching. I'm super excited and incredibly nervous. I am so excited that my job is essentially discussing and practicing my favorite thing in the entire world, and it will be amazing to try and get the kids to see the joy in writing. I am nervous at the weight of responsibility. Its a big deal to have even a tiny portion of someones education in your hands.
That's why I'm polling you guys. I want to make this class valuable to my students. Something they will look forward to, and a place where they learn things that are applicable and interesting to them. So, what, in terms of creative writing, do you wish you'd learned in high school?
Whether you had a high school creative writing class or not, I want to know. What kinds of projects and exercises would have been helpful? What advice and knowledge would have saved you years of grief, if only yo had learned it from the beginning? If you were able to write a letter to your high school self, what would you tell yourself as far as your writing is concerned? That kind of thing. I definitely have ideas, but I want to try and miss as little as possible.
So, our high school selves. What do we want to know?
Sarah Allen
8 comments:
First, good luck Sarah! Sounds like a great gig. As for what I wish I learned, it's not so specific to craft. Just that, if you love to write, don't be afraid to do it for a living. Don't let anyone tell you it won't make you any money and it's not a real job. A lot of people tried to dissuade me from getting into this field and I listened and veered off course for a few years. I'm glad I'm back on the right course but I wish I had someone telling me from the beginning :-)
Best of luck on your first day Sarah. You're going to be great.
Your question is a tough one. I think I would have liked to have known that there are many forms of writing, and that they're all going to be useful at some point. The email, the academic essay, the short story. You really do need to learn the different voices.
Good luck!!
Let's see, what I wish I would've learned in high school . . . don't date losers!
Oh, wait, writing. Right. I actually studied craft on the Internet in high school, and I can see some of those influences in my writing: painful concision, absolutely no dialogue tags. Avoiding head hopping would've helped me a bit ;) .
But what I really wish I'd learned is something like what Sarah said: even within fiction there are different types of writing, and that doesn't make one kind garbage or bad or less "worthy." You don't have to write literary fiction to be considered a writer. Write what you enjoy reading.
Good luck! I wish I would have known that it is okay to suck at some forms of writing *cough* poetry *cough*
I think kids feel intimidated when they know they aren't very good at a particular writing style. I wish my teacher would have told me that he was happy that I was doing my best.
Do not, under any circumstances, make them start off any writing assignment by having them list the details to a story.
I took a college composition class during my juior year of high school, and the teach made us write a list of details of every story that we were assigned.
I failed at it so miserably (mostly because I joined the class halfway through and the teach never elaborated on what this was all about) that I had to take a freshman study hall in order to pass my class.
This one isn't about my own high school days but reflects what I see in some schools today. Please tell your students creativity is important but basic rules of grammar and punctuation still apply. I have a good friend who teaches at our local community college and she has students coming into her class who can't form a correct sentence. They claim their high school writing teachers told them creativity was all that mattered.
I think people should be urged to write from the heart. Often we're persuaded to write what we think is clever or valuable when I think we should all write what we want to write. All forms of writing are valuable.
Good luck on your first day!
So how did it go?
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