Based on the dialogue in the OP, it sounds like ganging up, and I can see how the students could feel like it is. I think Dangerosa’s approach might help the students learn to critique. The students do need to learn that not everything they write is a work of art. Like I said, their approach isn’t helping each other become better writers. But, if the students aren’t learning the proper way to go about this, it’s up to the teacher to find some way to get them in the proper mindset.
I’ve had my stuff publicly reviewed, and it was for sale. And I’ve been given poor reviews. And they hurt. But they give me something to think about.
I’ve sure as hell given others poor reviews. I’ve slaughtered other people’s hard work.
Ex (very last paragraph, after several others detailing the specific problems):
I didn’t say that because I’m mean. I said it because it was my responsibility to tell potential purchasers whether the game was worth buying. The developers were surely hurt. They probably worked hard on their product, and I told millions of people it wasn’t worth buying.
So you’re preaching to the choir telling me the kids need to learn the right way to do it. What I was criticizing is the professor’s method of teaching them the right way.
May I suggest a Workshop for your outlet? I was a member of The Loft (in Chicago) for a few years, and found it to be everything my undergrad CW class wasn’t. For starters, the people are older, and they sought the forum out. The critiques were excellent (for the most part), the people relatively well-read (no-ones as well read as one’s self, after all), and the leader was excellent in maintaining direction.
I seem to remember that you’re in AL. Is there a college town nearby that might offer a workshop for adults? A Barnes and noble that offers a freebie? Or, you could try an on-line workshop (Critters.org works well for me).
agree that you need to look at your own teaching style, pseudotron. If you find that all eighteen-year-olds are impossible to deal with, then you shouldn’t be teaching them: you should find a different profession.
There ARE ways to get 18-year-olds to open up and talk honestly and critically about their own writing. And then there are ways to get them to think, “God, the teacher is such an asshole! I just want the course to be over!” If most of the students are thinking the latter, it’s not their fault: it’s yours.
Some suggestions:
-Recognize that these are kids who are learning to do something. Of COURSE they’re not going to be very good at it: if they were experts, they wouldn’t be in your class. Comments about “pointless, cliche-ridden student exercises” show a contempt that does not belong in the classroom.
-Recognize that you’re teaching them to do something intimate: good fiction writing often involves baring the soul, and your students will make themselves very, very vulnerable to you and the class. If you don’t respect what they’ve done, then you’ll end up hurting them, and then they’ll only write pointless, cliche-ridden exercises for you in the future.
-Nix the best-and-worst thing. That’s got no pedagogical benefit, and only serves to embarrass the best and humiliate the worst.
Now, what can you do positively?
-The three-positive, three-negative thing.
-Each week, have a challenging question to ask the students. As one example, once students have exchanged work, tell them, “Okay, in reading this, I want you to be looking at the author’s use of metaphor. Write down all the metaphors you see, write down what they mean, and decide whether you think each metaphor contributed to the work, or detracted from it, and be prepared to explain why.”
-If you want to be crazy, have papers traded anonymously, and let students know that you’ll be slipping a ringer in there each week. Students will provide written feedback on the paper they receive, and you’ll be grading them based on their feedback in addition to based on their drafts. If someone responds to your ringer with “Gee, that’s great!” then they lose points: they need to offer specific praise and specific suggestions for improvement.
Again, though, if the students are hating you, instead of hating them back, you need to take a good hard look at what you’re doing wrong. It’s very possible to have college students love you for your rigorous curriculum: you need to figure out how to do that.
I think they are clueless. I think they don’t understand the freedom you were giving Nessa re the option whether to pursue that bit of writing or not. Sounds to me like they are very comfortable with endless variations on a theme and no real creativity. It’s a mindset–I don’t know if you can work through it or not.
I like the written critique paragraph idea. I also like the sandwich approach and the you must say 3 things, good and bad to each author.
How is it mean or passive/aggressive to say to students–did you develop this theme as much as you could have? What does the hockey mask symbolize? Why is Marcie so angry–do you think her character stays true through the story or do you change elements about her to serve the plot?
WTF is wrong with college students (or CW students). I never took CW in college, but surely they are there to improve their writing? Perhaps a a come to Jesus talk with them about criticism and editing and how vital that is to all good writing will help.
Good luck–keep whiskey in your draw and Tylenol in your pocket–sounds like you may need both!
Oddly enough, two and a half hours before the OP was written, I enrolled in a creative writing class. I needed an elective, and figured Introduction to creative fiction would be fun. I was surprised the class size was so small (15 here too), but it sounds fun from the OP.
Uck. The idea of a creative writing class filled with nothing but encouragement of the students’ “creativity” is probably why I never bothered taking a class in it. The exchange in the OP started when the professor asked for areas of the piece that needed improvement and - God forbid - implied that there exists the possibility that the student might herself decide that the piece wasn’t worth the effort of improving - which is natural. Not every idea results in a published novel, right? It’s up to her to decide whether or not to continue working on it. Nessa started an argument because prradmitted the possibility existed that Nessa might choose to sometime, somewhere, scrap a piece of her own work? The only reason that the exchange didn’t include prr offering a concrete criticism, I remind you, is because the student being criticized started an argument over the very notion that she might conceivably not develop every idea into a finished work.
Satasha, if students aren’t going to actually do nuts-and-bolts work on their writing in a college-level creative writing class, when do they actually get the opportunity to do that stuff? It’s one thing to decide that unbridled creativity is the goal of a workshop with eight-year-olds, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be the only goal of a college class.
No student is going to like criticizing other students’ work, of course. Going with a format that allows them to wrap negative criticism in positive comments is probably a good idea. Lord save me from ending up in a room full of undergrads writing their trite purple prose and praising one another for it, anyway. I don’t envy prr in the least. Of course, my own cynicism and general bitchiness is why prr is teaching the class and not me.
If you read this as some sort of condemnation of Nessa’s piece, you’re doing the same thing she did: reading way more into prr’s statements than is actually there. If saying a piece “needs work” is too harsh a critique, the criticizee simply has too fragile an ego to write anywhere in the real world.
IMHO, the literary and creative writing maturity just isn’t there at 18, with very few exceptions. I was one of those students back when I was a freshman, but I know I would take your constructive criticism (and more inclined to see how you are steering the work on a piece) far better now, than being naturally defensive as a teenager and just going for easy outs on a paper and peer review.
As the prof, you are either expecting most of the class to take huge steps upward towards your standards (which is what you are currently doing) or succumb to their deficiencies and accept marginal work. You are in a tough spot…hence your frustration…I don’t blame you…it’s just that you are dealing with kids who have just turned adults, that are just starting out beyond the borders of high school and their home town.
I think part of the problem might be that Nessa is looking for a clear and well defined set of instructions, as opposed to a “what do you feel like” type of approach. Perhaps she’s not used to writing off a project that seems to be going nowhere in the interest of conserving her energy for other projects.
I know that is why I personally dislike participating in writing critique, because something will always be “wrong” or not as good as it COULD be. It’s true that one could edit forever and still not be satisfied with the result - not a desirable situation to me.
But why the assumption that these students have any expectation, or indeed aspiration, to write for a living? Maybe they took the class on a lark. Maybe they thought it sounded fun and never had any exposure to a creative writing class in high school. Maybe they wanted to improve their writing in a general way and thought this would be a good way to do it. Basically, we don’t know why the students in his class are there, but I’m under the impression that this class is a Freshman-level, introductory class without prerequisites. In other words, you don’t have to have the Great American Novel in you to sign up. You just have to have a free hour three times a week.
I don’t think the problem is that the students are looking to work for a living. This is a writing class. Thus the focus of it, being a class, is probably learning, in this case, learning to be a better writer. I think writing is something a lot of people try to do by ear, and while that will get you so far, you still need to be able to recognise when pieces of your writing don’t work and don’t make sense so that you can change them to work better. Sounds to me like the students here aren’t willing to do that, and thus they aren’t learning what they are being taught. It doesn’t matter what level the class is, but the students are paying to learn, and learning doesn’t just happen by the teacher getting in front of the class and spewing information. And in any creative field, you have to be able to recieve criticism well, and learn from it, if you want to ever improve.
Incidently, in my writing class today we were talking about stories we had written, but we didn’t get to mine. I got the assignment back, but there’s hardly anything written on it. I’m thinking I might go back to the teacher and talk to him about it, because I bet he has something to say that I should hear to help make me a better writer (this isn’t creative writing BTW, but rather narrative non-fiction, which is an elective I need for my major). I want to know what areas of my writing could possibly use a little work, because I honestly want to be a better writer.
It may not be an “Us against Him” situation. Nessa may simply be stacked and have long, shiny black hair.
I will say that it is somewhat unorthodox, in my experince, to suggest to a student that they drop a work. It certainly is a good lesson, but I’ll bet she’s never had a teacher tell her that before, and is trying to figure out what it means. The same is probably true of the other students. You’re giving them a message that is contrary to everything they’ve been told in their education. They probably do not need to hear that the best they can hope for at this point is to produce some interesting juvenalia.
I have to cast my vote in with the poor approach crowd. First, this kind of one-on-one conversation with a student in front of the class rarely gets anywhere. Second, from the way it progressed, it sounded like you were being overly hostile.
Here you’re singling out Nessa’s work…And you’re making it be about Nessa. You didn’t ask “how does this piece need improvement”, though you certainly meant it, but what did Nessa do wrong?
The ‘don’t you’ at the end here turns the question into something more hostile than you intended it to be.
It probably wasn’t your intention, but this line implies that you feel Nessa does not care about the story. This continues building the hostility.
Here you’re accusing the class of lying, furthermore, you’re attempting to win their support in opposition to one of their classmates. This never goes over well, and offers nothing constructive.
:rolleyes: What’d you expect?
Here you’re still trying to get them to say “Nessa’s story was boring”. Why? Who does it help? Telling Nessa that her story is boring does not tell Nessa what to change. All it does is further the image that the class is you against them, and promote defensive behavior.
It sounds like you need to work on a non-hostile way to bring up mistakes. They need to feel that their work is valued(even if it sucks), or they won’t bother putting any effort into it.
I think that would be a good idea.
I would flat out refuse to participate in such an activity, grade be damned. If I take a class I take it to learn something, not to provide the professor with justification for giving a grade. How does this help anyone learn how to be a better writer? It does not indicate why a story was good or poor. It does not tell the writer of the ‘poor’ story how to improve, or what they did well. It does not tell the writer of the ‘good’ story what they did poorly, or why their story was ‘good’.
You could, I suppose, say that it helps them by creating an incentive to do better, so their story doesn’t get voted ‘worst’…but that discounts the fact that it forces the class into competition with itself, competition which hinders the ‘team’ atmosphere needed to respond well to criticism from their peers.
Those are specific and direct. “You’ve got the option, don’t you?” is not, neither is “I’m saying it needs work, and you may be better off putting that work into something you care more about.” Those statements are not too harsh, but they are too meaningless.
I’m kind of with Satasha here, who said “If you have concrete constructive criticism, give it straight out in terms they can understand.” It isn’t that the work shouldn’t have been criticized. It’s that that particular criticism would not have gotten me anywhere other than really annoyed at the prof. If I didn’t develop the theme, I need to be told that - so that I learn to recognize it in future works. If I need to fix the dialogue so it isn’t inane, I need to be told that. If the writing needs work, tell me where and what work it needs.
See, I read “I’m saying it needs work, and you may be better off putting that work into something you care more about.” as a gentle way of saying “give it up–this was DOA.”
I do agree with upthread poster who said, “what could be done to improve this piece” instead of making it Nessa’s. (anyone else continually thinking of Loch Ness here? No offense to Nessa, but I keep thinking her story must have been about Nessie!)
But still, these kids must see that in order to improve, changes must be made-and in order for changes, there must be fault found.
Could he improve his approach? Sure-a bit. But I think these kids really don’t understand the premise. Maybe he needs to go over some “ground rules” for CW and soon.
Again, this is problematic, because the product of a creative writing class ought not be a polished story: the product of a creative writing class is improved skills. A story that’s DOA can still be the subject of good work that helps improve skills.
I agree with you here. Going over the ground rules can be very helpful. As I said, I definitely think it’s possible to teach CW in a rigorous manner with high expectations and have the students (or a least a majority of the students) engaged and happy to be there. If you can’t do that, the problem is not with the students: it’s with your pedagogical skills.
Just as you want the students to take responsibility for their own poor skills and work to improve them, you need to take responsibility for your own.
If it helps, I’m in college now to learn to be a teacher, and I’m at least as hard on my own pedagogical skills as I’m being on yours. I recently taught a lesson to second-graders on how to use calculators, and those kids were all over the place. Their disinterest in the lesson, their distraction, their focus on the calculator’s colors instead of on the principle of repeated addition: these were my fault, not theirs. I’ve gotta learn to be a better teacher, so that I can move them along a rigorous curriculum and have them invested in it.
yes, but Daniel-the OP was leaving it up to Nessa to decide if she wanted to pursue this material or not.
I think THAT is what is freaking these kids out a bit. They are not used to having total control over their own work to that degree. I think they are used to studying for tests that they have been taught. I think they lack critical thinking skill on the most elemental level–and I think the OP is trying to get them to critically think about their work, as well as other’s. They have no idea how to do that. Perhaps the OP could model this behavior by finding some badly written non-fiction (ie newspaper article) and eviscerate that with the class. Next, do a bad short story–and then attack their own work. Something along those lines…
Does the OP need to modify his teaching style? Probably. But I think he has an uphill battle on his hands. The majority of his class doesn’t sound like they are interested in developing their writing skills–I have no idea why they are enrolled in this class.
I also think he needs to find out the motivations for the students fast so as to meet them where they are, so to speak.
Whereas I read “it needs work and you may be better off…” as a way to say “this is an assignment. Its a cheap, throw away, get ideas down on paper assignment early in a creative writing class. It isn’t the peice you will work on all semester and polish. It isn’t something you decided to do on your own and are invested in. So, if you were going to pick it up from here (which you aren’t because I had you write 500 words describing an apple as an exercise, unless you fell in love with this and have decided to perfect it for your own satisfaction) what you work on?”
In college I was roommates with a studio arts major. The first semester the professor wanted them to do some obscene number of studies, she didn’t look at them, but counted them. The five best were what you turned in for your grade, the rest they burned as a class. The whole idea (besides getting my roommate extensive practice) was to teach them that most of what they worked on was disposable. Don’t invest yourself in every one of your creations.
Sounds to me like what your (highly) trained to do is write, not teach writing; those are two different things. Of course, few teachers of college students ever get any training in how to teach.
It’s the teacher’s job, especially in a lower division course like this, to create a positive and encouraging learning environment. There are plenty of ideas in this thread about how to do this without abandoning your responsibility to show the students how they can improve and without lowering your standards for their performance. I agree with eleanorigby that you need to understand the motivations of your students. You also need to understand what your students are hearing when you’re talking to them.
Having the class choose the best story of the week is a fine idea. But I can’t see anything constructive about having them single out the worst one. That’s a highly effective tool for demoralizing its author without teaching any of the students how to improve their writing.
