Teaching Journal, Day 1
Uncategorized July 17th, 2007
NB: Dearest readers, the recent ebb in my rate of story publishing is somewhat related to a new project which I am working on. For the next two weeks, insha’Allah, I am teaching creative writing classes to students in 4th - 6th grades at a summer camp sponsored by the Muslim American Society. This likely means that I won’t have much time for 2000 word taxi posts for a few weeks; may Allah give me the energy to do my best! Our class’ first meeting was yesterday. My notes follow.
Today was my first day teaching creative writing to 4th-6th graders at day camp in Somerville. I had six students, three girls, three boys. Two twins. Five languages.
I asked them: What do you want to write?
They said:
Nothing.
We only write
in school.
One girl said:
I like to write animal stories.
I asked them: What do you think about poetry?
They said:
We hate it.
We aren’t good
at rhyming.
One girl said:
I know it doesn’t have to rhyme.
We read a chapter of “The Reptile Room” from the Series of Unfortunate Events, and discussed the role of the non-visual senses in describing things. I brought opaque lunch bags with mysterious kitchen trinkets* in them, and the children did writing exercises in which they described these objects using touch, taste, smell, and hearing. they wrote six sentence descriptions of creative ways you could use these mysterious utensils in
an imaginary kitchen.
They’re better at poetry than they think.
We played a game with a bag of plastic African animals, a bag of tiny colored pompoms and a world map. They picked at random an animal, a color and a continent each (though I suspect there was some cheating on the continents bit) and then wrote stories featuring those three things.
Some observations: They were upset by combinations of things that were unlikely to occur in the world without human interference, ie gazelles and Antarctica. They were ever-so-slightly subversive. They seemed to regard imagination as bending the rules:
One boy’s story involved a journey diverted from Europe to Africa by a grandfather’s abrupt move, because he preferred to write about Africa, but had drawn “Europe” on the dice.
Another boy confessed to fabrication in his piece about a kangaroo: “I didn’t know how high they could jump,” he said, shyly. “‘The kangaroo jumped to a height of 5 feet 6 inches, which is the average height of a twelve year old,’” he read. And paused, as if unsure of whether or not I was going to punish him for innovating. For lying. “I made that part up.”
One girl refused to write any fiction at all, and just wrote lists. She informed me that she liked to do research, not write stories. Perhaps she will be our first poet. I wonder if she will come back.
*egg smashers, honey swirlers, tiny cow-shaped cream boats, and a set of butterfly-dangly tablecloth clamps (for resisting wind).
February 4th, 2010 at 2:32 am
Great info I enjoy examples of the articles which have been written, and especially the comments posted! I am going to come back!