This was originally from Part 7, but I had to break it up as the post was extremely long.
The first half of the semester was spent teaching poetry. I took a lot of my poems from Barbara Drake’s book on teaching poetry, but I threw a few choices of my own too: Joe Brainard, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and even Dr. Seuss. It was definitely a challenge.
Apart from getting my students to read the works, I was forced to teach outside of my expertise. I have written poems and I knew a lot from the study of poetry, but my expertise was primarily in fiction. It forced me to read up, look up terms of poetry and the forms themselves. There were a few days I devoted to teaching the forms and I essentially became a math teacher. I tried to meter, rhyme, and the formulas for the forms, and it was like trying to teach algebra. How does one show the technical side of poetry without being dry? I did not want to create a bunch of formalist poets, but I felt it was important for them to know this stuff.
In addition, I had the students submit their poems for workshop. I tried having them submit the poems to the class website so that the writers would not go through the expense of copying the poems ahead of time. That did not work. I then had to go for the old fashioned photocopy for the entire class routine. I don’t think I was entirely successful in getting students to understand the schedule of the workshop. When workshops were successful, poems about relationships seemed to be the most common. Some students bemoaned the relationship poem. I defended the writer’s right to write about them and anything they wanted. If I were to teach creative writing again, I would still defend those writers.
Fiction was interesting. I initially thought I could rest upon my expertise as a storywriter, but it proved to be a bigger challenge than poetry. I did explain the technical aspects of the story, but it may have felt lost upon the students. Getting them to read the stories proved to be a bigger challenge than getting them to read the poems. There would be days where most of the students had not read the text. So, I resorted to a time-honored method employed by teachers – the quiz. I wrote simple quizzes and passed them out at the beginning of class. Some students showed that they did not read the story by their answers, some showed that they read it, and others showed a lack of attentive reading. The quiz certainly got some people’s attention, and one student claimed in an evaluation that the class “culminated into a brutally hard quiz.” Towards the end of the class, I learned from a lot of failed class discussions on how to point the material to make it a learning experience for them. When I taught “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor, I made a worksheet by preparing four questions for my students to do as homework. I then used the worksheet to facilitate a class discussion, and one of my students sent me e-mail at the end of the day to tell me I did a good job teaching that story.
A lot, but not all, of the works were by gay authors or had a gay theme. While these works did not always have gay themes, their authors were gay: Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, David Leavitt. To my knowledge, Ursula K. Le Guin is not a lesbian, but the short story I assigned, “Solitude,” had a lesbian theme. I had them go over two of the songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Some of my students resented this. I had an online discussion group set up for the class, and one student voiced her resentment in a post. She felt confronted by homosexuality in almost every work. Another student replied in agreement. When I got a copy of the class evaluations, I recognized the one by Mindy Shatner, though they were supposed to be anonymous. She was often hostile towards me in class. I often tried to figure it out, and the graduate advisor asked me if it could have been racial prejudice or homophobia. It was likely on the side of homophobia, as Mindy wrote in her evaluation that she was disturbed that every author was gay and that every story and poem had a homosexual theme.
On some level, I can understand the student who felt confronted with homosexuality in my assigned readings. However, I have often felt confronted with certain things throughout my life, whether in literature, cinema, or television. Literature has been presented as mostly white, male, and middle to upper class. In addition, it has also been presented as heterosexual. If the author were gay or lesbian, their sexuality was often played down. I never even knew gay authors or even non-white authors existed until I was in college. In movies and television, much of the world presented is a white, heterosexual one. It has gotten much better than the time when I was a child. At least now there are more prominent gay and non-white characters. But if the focus is gay or non-white, then the movie or television show winds up in some kind of ghetto. The same could almost be said for books.
In my defense, I did not have a “gay agenda” when it came to presenting these works. These stories and poems were for me examples of good and interesting writing. They were alive and not homogenous. They were varied in style and presentation. Chris Altacruise, a pen name of someone who criticized MFA programs in his or her article, felt American fiction was marked in its sameness of style and themes. I did not want to feed into that sameness. I hoped students would do works that reflected them. I hope I do work that reflect me, not my attempt to write like anyone else.
The summer after that first semester of teaching, I got a copy of the student evaluations. Some were exceedingly harsh, some were completely irrelevant, and some very helpful. I mentioned some of the harsh ones. There were a few others and reading them, I questioned my ability as a teacher. Some said things like the class was a waste of time or that I was a horrible public speaker. When I came across Mindy Shatner’s evaluation, I recognized it right away. The homophobia was clearly articulated and one of the things she wrote mirrored what she said during the confrontation – that she paid over $1000 to take the course and found it to be a waste of her time. Well, I certainly never got that $1000. I took a pen and wrote BUNDT* SNAP on the evaluation. I put it in the MEAN pile. I put the ones with stupid, irrelevant comments in the NOT HELPFUL pile. The few that were helpful pointed out both my strengths and weaknesses. The ones that praised me helped my spirit, and I definitely took to heart the ones that pointed out areas where I could improve.
I saw one of my students, the former Marine, on campus during the late summer. I told her about the bad evaluations and how it got me down. She told me that I wasn’t giving myself enough credit. She would not have thought about writing poetry if it were not for me. She also pointed out that one young woman, who wrote a humorous story about a fat teenager and her problems, kept going with the story in the next creative writing class. This young woman had discovered something uniquely hers and was definitely running with it.
*this is a made-up version of a cuss word, like Battlestar Galactica’s “Frak.”
More posts to come. Stay tuned.
