Tag: teaching

The Next Adventure

One year ago today, I graduated from Kenyon College. My time at Kenyon was spectacular—four years of fascinating classes and amazing friends—and when it was all over, I went out into the real world, totally confident that I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

 

Or so I thought.

 

My plan: I was going to go to Italy and teach for a year, and I was going to love it, and then I was going to go to graduate school for a Masters in Fine Arts in creative writing, and then I was going to teach creative writing—hopefully as a college professor—and of course, write. I might, if I decided I wanted to, get a Ph.D in comparative literature. Sounds perfect, right?

 

So I graduated, submitted all of my applications to MFA programs, and went off to Italy. And it didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t enjoy teaching. Sure, there were times when the lessons went great and everything was perfect, times when it felt like it clicked, but more often than not, I was battling exuberantly inattentive students or just plain bored . I have had some truly excellent teachers, and I have the utmost respect for them, and I really wanted to be like them. I tried to convince myself that things would get better. I’d just started teaching, after all. I was in a foreign country with students who didn’t speak English as their first language. I was working with high school students, and I’d always thought I would want to be a college professor. I was living far away from home, I wasn’t teaching the subject I thought I wanted to teach, and I was a teaching assistant, working with another teacher, instead of in my own classroom. But things didn’t improve, and by Christmas, I was positive that the problem wasn’t any of these things. The problem was I just didn’t want to be a teacher.

 

By this time, I’d also realized I didn’t want to be a full-time writer either. I’d always thought having the ability to write full-time would be the dream. I was only teaching in the mornings (school in Italy finishes at about 1:00 every day), and in the afternoons I was still too terrified of the crazy drivers to venture far from my apartment, so I spent all the time I wasn’t in school writing. It was as close to full-time writing as I’ve ever come. At first, it was great. I was so productive. But then it started to get a bit lonely, even for my inner introvert. And then, after I submitted all my revised short stories to the Dell Award, I was totally burnt out and didn’t know what to do with myself. I realized that, if all I’m doing is writing, I tend to write in giant bursts and then stop and not know what to do next and not have the energy to do anything even if I know what I want to do. But if I’m writing while doing something else, as I’ve been writing all my life while in school, I could write regularly and complete projects without burning out.

 

So, I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t want to write full-time (I still wanted to write, of course, just not full-time). Add to that the fact that being in Italy, which was my dream for years, was not what I’d expected, and I felt pretty awful. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and even if I figured that out, how could I trust myself that it was what I really wanted to do? Everything I had thought I wanted was a lie, after all.

 

I felt like this year was taking me apart, piece by piece, and putting me back together again all wrong. I felt like I would reach for something—an idea, a dream, a goal, my self-confidence or sense of humor—and it was not where I had left it.

 

I’m not one to wallow in confusion and misery—though it was very tempting this time. I would find something else I wanted to do, and I would try it, and if it didn’t work out, then I would try something else. Eventually I would figure it out. And I was starting to have another idea.

 

In November, I was invited to a dinner at the International Lions Club in Assisi. The Lions Club is an association promoting independence for the blind around the world. In Italy, they run a guide dog school, and they had heard that I was living independently in Assisi with a guide dog. At the dinner, I was very disturbed to learn that, due to financial constraints, their guide dog school could only match twenty to thirty blind people with dogs each year. The Seeing Eye, where I got Mopsy, matches at least two hundred guide dogs with blind handlers each year, and I know of at least five other guide dog schools in America. It is very expensive to train guide dogs, certainly. The Seeing Eye is funded by grants and donations, but as far as I could tell, the people at the dinner for this guide dog school were most interested in complaining about how hopeless the situation was. I understand I didn’t have a full picture of the situation, but to have a guide dog requires a certain level of independence on the part of the blind handler, so this was the first association I’d seen in Italy that was really promoting independence for the blind. And yet, when I cut up my own potatoes, my hosts broke into applause.

 

It was almost 2:00 in the morning when I got home that night, furious with the world, and while I was trying to calm down so I could get to sleep, I had the sudden thought, “You know, I could do something about this. I could work to make this sort of thing better.”

 

Since I stand by the fact that no idea at 2:00 in the morning is a good idea unless it still seems like a good idea in the light of day, I put that thought, and my frustration, to rest. But in the light of day, it did still seem like a good idea, and it kept growing. And after I was denied access to the Leaning Tower of Pisa with Mopsy—even though I called ahead to say I had a service dog and then presented my letter from the Fulbright Commission citing the Italian laws that allow service dogs access to all places open to the public without paying extra fees—I knew my idea was a good one.

 

It’s been a year since I left Kenyon, and it’s been a crazy year, filled with a whole lot of uncertainty and confusion and fear, but I know what I want to do, at least for now. It’s been a bumpy road, but I’m certain that every bump was important for getting me onto this path.

 

I have three more weeks of school here in Italy. Then I plan to visit Venice, Ancona, and other small towns around Umbria and Tuscany before I return to America. And I’ve decided that when I return to America, I will get a job and apply to law school so I can become a disabilities rights attorney. I have always had someone advocating for me—that’s how I got to where I am—and now that I’ve really had to advocate for myself, I’ve realized just how important it is. Plus, I like arguing. And I will always continue to write. I have some other projects planned as well. And I’ll see what happens. This feels right now, but you never know, and I’m okay with that. So I’m going to enjoy my last weeks in Italy, and then, let the next adventure begin.

Back to Basics

A few weeks ago, my two most advanced classes read my short story, “Naming Angelo,” which placed in this year’s Dell Award, and then we had a discussion about the story. The questions and the discussion were incredible. I was definitely able to see just how much they had grown in confidence in their English this year, and it was also really surreal to be asked questions about the choices I’d made for this story, as a writer. When one student asked, “Why did you choose to parallel your character’s struggle with personal identity with the struggle for Italian national identity during the risorgimento?” I was blown away. Not only was it a fabulous question, but I also had to think fast, because I hadn’t been thinking about any parallels between personal and national identity at all—when I first wrote the story, I was thinking, “This could be a cool time period to set this in,” and nothing more. We rounded off the class by me asking the students to share what they thought happened next after the fairly ambiguous ending of the story. If you ever need a lesson in how a story, once written, belongs to the readers, ask a bunch of seventeen-year-olds to tell you what happens next. Their responses ranged from martyrdom and bloody battles, to shameful victory and then unknowing marriage to the villain’s brother, to incest (I have no idea where that came from, but yikes!).

 

Anyway, after the students had read my story, I asked them if they would be interested in doing some creative writing lessons, and they were. they’ve been studying literature for their whole high school careers, and they had no background in creative writing at all aside from any they had done on their own, so they were very interested. This led to me teaching a series of lessons in the basics of creative writing.

 

In all honesty, after a year of teaching, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be a teacher. I have had some incredible teachers, and I really admire them, but I’m coming to the conclusion that you have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy teaching, and even though I thought I was that kind of person, now I’m not so sure. I just don’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would, and there are other things I would like to do that I think I would be better at. But more on that later, because even though I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be a teacher, I will say that I’ve had a blast teaching these kids creative writing.

 

Since these students had never had formal creative writing lessons, we started with the basics. What is creative writing? Why do we write? What are the basic elements of a story? I then gave them prompts to choose from and had them outline and write a short (1 to 2 page) story for homework. The next week, first drafts in hand, I had the students pair up and read each other’s stories and give each other feedback. Then we discussed plot in more depth. What is plot? How can you outline a plot? What are some of the basic plot arcs? And so on. This time for homework, they had to map out their stories plot, and then they had to write several different beginnings to their story to see their options for where to start. Finally, using their new beginnings, their outlines, and their classmates’ feedback, they revised their story for the next lesson.

 

We did imilar exercises with character. First they read and gave feedback on their partner’s stories—different partners this time so they would get a variety of feedback. Then we talked about characters, agency, motivation, etc. We had a lot of fun coming up with examples of strong characters they enjoyed reading about. We even invented a few examples to demonstrate how motivation works. Why did the protagonist blackmail the driving instructor? The driving instructor was determined to fail the protagonist, so he wouldn’t be able to get his license and couldn’t drive his little brother to soccer practice. And if the protagonist’s brother couldn’t get to soccer practice, he would be bullied at school. And maybe the protagonist was bullied at school when he was younger, and he wanted to try to protect his brother. So why is the driving instructor determined to fail the protagonist? No, she can’t just be evil with no purpose. Maybe she’s going through a divorce and something about the protagonist’s attitude reminds her of her cheating husband? Maybe she has suspicions that he’s a supervillain and will use his license for evil? Coming up with these examples as a group and getting the students involved was tons of fun, but could get a little weird at times. They’re definitely a very creative bunch. After that lesson, they had to answer some questions about their protagonist and their antagonist, and then they had to pick a scene in their story and write it from the antagonist’s point of view to get into their head and understand their motivations. Then they had to revise.

 

Next we covered setting and all the cool things you can do with it. We talked a lot about how setting can—and in my opinion should—be as important as any character to the story. We talked about how setting isn’t just time and place, but it’s also weather and mood. We talked about how setting can reveal things about the characters involved. If a couple is having a heated argument in their home, it says something different than if they’re having a shouting match in the middle of a fine restaurant. And again, they revised their stories.

 

Tomorrow, for our final lesson, we’re going to talk about point of view. I should be planning that lesson now, actually, instead of writing this post, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve had to go back to the very basics of creative writing—back to things I learned in elementary and middle school. These are skills that are so ingrained in me that they’re second nature, and it was often very difficult to explain them. But in explaining them, I also gave myself a refresher course on the basics, which can never hurt, and was actually quite fun. I also wanted to make it hands on, so that what I was talking about was put into practice with their own stories, and so I had them work on the same stories all the way through all the lessons, revising first plot, then character, then setting. They have critiqued each other’s stories each lesson, always working with a new partner, and we have talked extensively about how to give and take criticism. Working with the same story like this isn’t a system I have encountered in any of the creative writing classes I’ve taken, but I think it’s worked out well for these students. After we talk about point of view, they will revise one more time, and then turn in their final drafts. So, while I’m not sure I enjoy teaching on the whole, and I’m not sure it’s what I want to do for a career, I have really enjoyed teaching creative writing to these students, and I can’t wait to read their final stories.