No, seriously. Help me. |
Recently, I’ve asked publicly, nay begged, for people to punch me in the throat if they hear me utter the following words aloud:
“So, I have this great idea for a class…”
Consider it a cry for help.
This hybrid fiction class is awesome. It’s pretty much all a
creative writer working in academia could ask for – the freedom and
encouragement to chase down a new way of helping students grow. In many ways,
it’s like writing the story of the exact type of class I really want to teach
and then enacting the story with real-life actors.
But the class is also extremely overwhelming, in that I had
almost no models to work from when creating it and no body of reflections from
others because there isn’t anything for them to reflect on in this vein. At
least, not in creative writing circles.
My friend Trent created a somewhat similar course, but his
aims and mine are vastly different in terms of student takeaway, which means
the architectures of our courses diverge quite a bit. And outside of some
standalone activities I’ve read about, I just haven’t run across this type of
class.
This is not a subtle brag. It’s the reason for the bags
under my eyes. Every class session, traditional or virtual, carries its own
learning curve. Every flaw in the system, no matter how hard I worked to eliminate
them, requires almost immediate attention.
And if this class is novel for me, the guy who spent more
than a year researching and constructing it, then just imagine the combined
apprehension and nervous energy of 20 students who thought they’d signed up for
a traditional lecture and workshop fiction class.
It is no tired
business metaphor to say that while I am not building the plane while it’s in
the air, but I’m definitely still bolting down the seats.
I just hope that all the work I've done makes the next redesign I'm planning - I'm looking at you Literary Nonfiction - a little bit less insane.
This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment