Sunday, February 12, 2012
Williams: The Workshop
I've been in advanced, university creative writing workshops and never had instruction or an atmosphere like those Williams' blueprints in Chapter 4. My professors were published, some anthologized, but none were writers in the classroom. Following their lead, discussion of our work focused on punctuation, grammar, surface edits. "Remove this, I'd use the word '______' here, bring this down to the next line." There was never any prodding of our ideas, no discussing strategies, intentions, theories. The classrooms were stuffy because very few of the students bonded. We were nervous and we never stopped seeking approval for a story or poem well-done. We were always measuring ourselves against the next guy. No one emphasized writing as a process or even writing as something to be practiced. Being messy would have been humiliating. Not having it figured out seemed unacceptable. You had to have something good and you had to have it each week. Real revision couldn't happen because the professor collected "revisions" on the last day of the term, a busy assignment for a quick grade. Feedback? None. I'm not putting previous professors on blast to tear down the system. Teaching really is a tough job. But poor instruction still happens at the university level. And the notion that we teach the way we were taught scares me, so maybe I'm trying to exercise some of my demons. I want to be different. I found this chapter refreshing.
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I've tutored many students, at the community college, who have come to believe that the writing workshops they've had in class are just strictly for grammar. Since they only spend about 15 minutes of class doing the workshop, all they do is focus on grammatical errors and eve then, it's not as beneficial as we would like to think they are.
ReplyDeletePlus most students, who haven't bonded, are usually just apathetic with each other's papers as Williams points out. The bonding part is very important, but from what I observe of most students I work with is that most of them aren't in class to make friends. They're just there to get through the class.
"Linking up", among other strategies, is something we've been trying to emphasize to students at the college I work at.