tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post2384585182503157271..comments2023-12-16T02:44:20.427-06:00Comments on Reginald Shepherd's Blog: A Few Issues in the Creative Writing ClassroomReginald Shepherdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-23271070334207914482011-03-22T15:31:15.756-06:002011-03-22T15:31:15.756-06:00Good post man, just looking around some blogs, see...Good post man, just looking around some blogs, seems a pretty nice platform you are using.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.sense2.com.au/category/62/promotional-inflatable-toys" rel="nofollow">Inflatable toys</a>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-26434570029543753132011-02-26T15:35:02.909-06:002011-02-26T15:35:02.909-06:00It's a great Festival, and you are fully deser...It's a great Festival, and you are fully deserved of being there with you're ambitious and talented. And..anyhow, I hope we'll have more CONS in Orlando...It's fun!<br /><a href="http://www.sense2.com.au/category/51/promotional-office-gifts-corporate-gifts" rel="nofollow">Corporate Gifts</a>Andersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17049788877147539926noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-38993957152753604682010-12-21T03:10:03.451-06:002010-12-21T03:10:03.451-06:00From my experience of being in a crit circle, and ...From my experience of being in a crit circle, and of trying to produce publishable prose myself, I think what you describe is part of a wider problem: it's very very hard to get distance from your own work and see it as others see it.M Harold Pagehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08949772130509527838noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-2758517650700138562010-04-18T02:38:27.384-06:002010-04-18T02:38:27.384-06:00What is interesting is as a teacher who spend a wo...What is interesting is as a teacher who spend a workshop dealing with the reading of a poem, otther issues come to play. Students (undergrad and grad) who have such a hard time dealing with vagueness see any poem that doesn't rely on concrete autobiographical absorptive narrative often see that as an excuse or a justification for vagueness. <br /><a href="http://www.moldcareer.com/" rel="nofollow">Mold Inspection</a>Arizona foreclosureshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04770199460449221544noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-70026298770656226412009-11-27T23:56:00.679-06:002009-11-27T23:56:00.679-06:00Oes Tsetnoc one of the
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He gave me some <A HREF="http://www.gameim.com/product/Asda_Story_gold.html" REL="nofollow">Asda Story money</A>, he said that I could <A HREF="http://www.gameim.com/product/Asda_Story_gold.html" REL="nofollow">buy Asda Story Gold</A>, but I did not have money, then I played it all my spare time. From then on, I got some <A HREF="http://www.gameim.com/product/Asda_Story_gold.html" REL="nofollow">cheap Asda Story gold</A>.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-16935558982522795512007-03-24T10:17:00.000-06:002007-03-24T10:17:00.000-06:00Dear Steve,Thanks very much for your comment on th...Dear Steve,<BR/><BR/>Thanks very much for your comment on this most recent post on creative writing. I’ve been looking forward to your response, as I’ve greatly appreciated your thoughtful and insightful comments.<BR/><BR/>I realize that there is an element of blame in my description of student limitations. Complaining about student failings is an academic genre in itself. Students’ shortcoming are not all their fault. Most of them have been failed by an educational system that passes them on from grade to grade without teaching them much. In Florida, where I live, they are taught almost nothing but how to take the FCAT, the state mandated standardized tests that determine whether students will advance to the next grade and what sorts of funding schools will receive (a strong incentive for cheating by both parties). But I do believe that students need to take greater responsibility for their own educations than they frequently do. Too many students don’t come to college to realize their own possibilities (in your eloquent phrase), though they can often be detoured in that direction when it’s pointed out to them.<BR/><BR/>While I have taught at one elite institution, most of my students have been like yours, first generation college students with no background in literature, and often no solid educational foundation at all. Part of what I try to do in my courses is to make up in some small way for those deficits, to at least open the door to literature as an engaging experience and to writing as an artistic practice. My students tend to feel a) afraid of being shown up as unintelligent or ignorant (which can interfere with higher education’s mission to develop intelligence and fill gaps in knowledge); b) resentful of the demands being made of them (especially since few demands were made of them in high school); and c) entitled, because they’re paying customers and teachers work for them. One of my department chairs explained to me some years ago that “we have a customer service model of education.” It’s never been clear to what, in this model, the product being sold is.<BR/><BR/>I’ve tried to be balanced in my discussion. My second post, “More on Creative Writing Pedagogy,” emphasized the limitations of academics and teachers of creative writing. My third, “A Few Issues in the Creative Writing Classroom,” centered on student limitations.<BR/><BR/>Like yours, my ambitions for the creative writing classroom are more focused and less wide-ranging than K. Silem Mohammad’s. I don’t try to transform my students’ consciousness in the course of a semester or even a year (what I call the salvational model of teaching, in which students are led from their benighted false consciousness into the light of the true intellectual faith). Nor do I think I could do so. But I do try to instill and/or help them to recognize some principles that they will be able to apply to whatever writing and reading they will do in the future, “creative” or otherwise. (It’s important to remember that most creative writing students, even at the graduate level, will not become “writers” and don’t aim to.)<BR/><BR/>Your discussion of the difference between vagueness and well deployed abstraction (there is, of course, all too much badly deployed abstraction), and of how to get students to recognize the difference in their own work and in the work of others, how to get them to see that there are many modes of specificity and concreteness besides autobiographical narrative, was particularly interesting and enlightening.<BR/><BR/>In my literature classes we will often spend an entire class period on a single poem, actually exploring it, paying it the kind of attention that really opens it up, that helps students discover the possibilities even in a single, short text. In my creative writing courses I do assign books, and discuss poems from in class, though not at such great length. I also have students write prose responses in which they discuss at least two poems from the book. I think that it’s important to provide students with concrete models of the things we’re talking about, and I choose books that exemplify particular aspects or techniques that I wish to emphasize.<BR/><BR/>Thanks again for reading and for your thoughtful and insightful comments.<BR/><BR/>all best,<BR/><BR/>ReginaldReginald Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-83077786645980902262007-03-23T21:43:00.000-06:002007-03-23T21:43:00.000-06:00Hi,Thank you for posting more of your article. Be...Hi,<BR/><BR/>Thank you for posting more of your article. Because my undergraduate creative writing class was just about to begin to settle into a workshop format, I decided to use a class period to "teach" your blog/essay.<BR/><BR/>I thought you may be interested in what my students (and I) had to say. After identifying the generalizations and helping them understand you were writing a polemic, they had some arguments of their own against your article. <BR/><BR/>I do teach at SUNY Brockport which consists largely of students who transfered from a community college and is rural. A lot of students are first generation college students, so that may/may not explain some of their responses.<BR/><BR/>A lot of my students don't want to take poetry writing. They prefer fiction. Unlike a research one institution which has more middleclass uppermiddle class students who want "access" to certain types of knowledge for class reasons, my students are not pretentious. (And at the same time I don't want to romanticize them for not being rich or as well off. And at the same time pretentiousness can be a wonderful thing. It causes to have students to want, to understand, to aspire if for the wrong reasons.)<BR/><BR/>One of my students gernerously said that she believes whatever the teacher says, that she didn't know there were other reasons to write a poem than to write about yourself. Most of my students haven't read ANY contemporary poems, and when I say this: I do not mean to exclaim any thing. Surprise or shock or disappointment. That's the way it is. And as teachers, we have to respond to that. I am becoming a bit annoying by posts (I'm not implying yours are like that, but I do notice a general trend), that can't really seem to believe how limited are students skills are. It seems mean and unkind and also not much of a contribution to a productive discussion.<BR/><BR/>What are we going to do about it. Go slow. I stopped teaching books of poetry in my poetry classes, because I found out that if you deal with ONE poem for an HOUR CLASS, and force them to identtify their confusions and then collectively as a class try to figure them out: it takes a long time.<BR/><BR/>What is interesting is as a teacher who spend a workshop dealing with the reading of a poem, otther issues come to play. Students (undergrad and grad) who have such a hard time dealing with vagueness see any poem that doesn't rely on concrete autobiographical absorptive narrative often see that as an excuse or a justification for vagueness.<BR/><BR/>As someone who writes a lot of absorptive poetry, but feels ethically committed as teacher to show aesthetic diversity, I find myself often trapped: when student writing skills are so weak, how do I remain 1.) committed to showing them in published poems where abstraction works while 2.) at the same time discourafging vaguessness in their own poems. In an undergraduate (and even sometimes graduate class) students have a very very difficult time to distinguish bettwen vaguesss and abstraction and concrete. You could spend (and I often do) spend 4 or 5 weeks doing that, and the students will still be insecure and tentative in their ability to identity those things in other peoples' poems let alone be able to write their own effective/ineffective examples of each with considerable self-awareness.<BR/><BR/>My students felt that your article located a lot of the blame with/inside them. That's why they come into school: to make them realize their possibilities. Towards the end of the post, you took teachers more to task, they felt than you did in the gist of the article.<BR/><BR/>I guess that's my overall reaction in some ways as well. I can't wait to read the whole thing when it surely will be published soon. And I hope your article spawns a discussion as to some specific things teachers can do, and some of the problems inherent in teaching aesthetic diversity when our undergradstudents laregely have remedial or barely average writing skills.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for your generosity,<BR/>Steve FellnerSteve Fellnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12181155226508233319noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-44392439634967065462007-03-22T16:09:00.000-06:002007-03-22T16:09:00.000-06:00This comment has been removed by the author.Kevinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08640770705948611352noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-55351124469941647532007-03-19T17:51:00.000-06:002007-03-19T17:51:00.000-06:00Dear Scotland,Your music composition teacher sound...Dear Scotland,<BR/><BR/>Your music composition teacher sounds quite amazing. I admire the way he set up the course as a kind of gradus ad parnassum, taking one step at a time up the ladder, breaking down the compositional process to its smallest units, making sure that one had a solid footing before one took the next step. I also admire the way that his exercises, each apparently small and delimited, also introduced students to the larger world of musical practice. That kind of rigor (and that kind of scope) is sorely lacking in most creative writing courses, in which, as I've written, much effort often has to be expended simply to convince students that there is something to be learned, that there are basic skills and techniques to be mastered before one can even approach the question of expression. As you so aptly put it, students in any artistic medium must learn how to be taken seriously in the discipline, and that requires that they in turn take the discipline (in all senses of the word) seriously. But while no one (I think) believes that they intuitively know how to write music, many people believe that, because they possess basic literacy, they know how to write poetry or fiction.<BR/><BR/>Take good care, and thanks for reading and commenting.<BR/><BR/>all best,<BR/><BR/>ReginaldReginald Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11965170916626482963noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4014415529871703586.post-54790356060528280972007-03-19T17:37:00.000-06:002007-03-19T17:37:00.000-06:00Dear Mr.Shepherd, a strange feeling came over me r...Dear Mr.Shepherd, a strange feeling came over me reading this post and I reflected on time spent in music composition courses. One thing I remember was how my would be mentor wittled down the class by the difficulty of work assigned,his active criticisim, and standard for work acceptance were formidible. Assignments at the early levels required understanding components which defined specific models and which had to be followed to even get a grade. There were no fully free writing exercises,but there was no doubt,we were paying the price to break into the upper sections. and learning how to be taken seriously in this dicipline. I remember that half our grade was also dependent on ear-training exercises which were different than the standard music theory exercises. We were expected to identify all the tonal permutations possible within the limits of three tones,their possible inversions and their expansions into reasonable extentions of the audible range. Remarkable about this is that it essentially covered all possible harmonic practice in 12-tone based western music. It was friccin' hard ,but became a shorthand and guide for an expanded,easily referenced harmonic vocabulary. Talk about parental figures whoa!<BR/>It cranked my gears and made me listen to my own effort in which greater terms, and a real sense of personal responcibility. SPH <BR/><BR/>P.S My personal nickname for Dr.G.K was the White Rabbit.scotlandhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01549546977518972516noreply@blogger.com