Posts Tagged: If You Want To Go To Grad School

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31
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 8)

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.

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31
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 7)

This relates to my previous post about my first time teaching. Last time, I wrote about it being a nightmarish job, especially when it came to dealing with Mindy Shatner. Here, I’ll explore it further.

The very first time I taught a class, I lost a lot sleep the night before. I woke up at 2:00 am and would not go back to sleep, no matter how much I tried. I usually can go to sleep within 30 minutes of shutting my eyes, but not that night. I lay in the dark with my eyes shut for hours, but I stayed awake until I had to leave my apartment to show up for work.

Though I had no sleep, I was wide-awake with anxiety. I hoped it would go well and not look like a flake. I was extremely nervous and stuttered through the syllabus. Seeing the students in a row terrified me. I got them to sit in a row, but it never really happened again. I took a course from the Rhetoric department on how to teach an introductory composition class, but it did not prepare me for this. Especially, how to have authority as a teacher.

I gave out tons of readings, photocopied poems and stories every week. I would go over them in class, but hardly anyone read them. Or at least none of them wanted to say anything. I would explain the works, but I wouldn’t always do them well. Other days, I explained the work well enough so that they could understand them.

I was not as organized as I would like to be. I got behind in grading student works. Sometimes I was late to class. I usually arrived to campus early to read and get ready, but sometimes I woke up later and took the bus, which never gets you anywhere on time. Sometimes I was not prepared and winged it. Other days, I got too inspired and e-mailed last-minute changes to the students.

It was often hard to control the class. I had a hard enough time getting them to do the readings, but they often talked. I often got most of them to quiet down, but a few persisted in having side-conversations. One of the worst offenders was a college senior named Mindy Shatner, whom I mentioned in a previous post. She often glared angrily at me. I tried reaching out to her, include her in the class discussion, but she would shrug her shoulders and not want to participate. Her angry energy seemed to ping-pong, especially when she talked out of turn, because I would sharply tell her to be quiet. As I mentioned in the previous post, I don’t remember whose fault it was first, but it would culminate into an unpleasant confrontation neither of us would ever forget. I have to admit, I often felt better when she was absent and classroom control was much easier. Some students would tell me towards the end of the semester that Mindy was a negative presence.

The few weeks after the confrontation with Mindy were emotionally difficult. I did not show up to a graduate seminar on multi-cultural literature for two or three weeks. I drank beer to calm myself down and go to sleep. I couldn’t focus on writing. At a community college writing center where I also worked at the time, one time I drew a picture of Mindy and stabbed it with a pencil. I horrified the receptionist, who was a good friend of mine. I said some horrble things and made some ugly jokes when venting to friends. And then for months after, I fantasized about calling Homeland Security or INS on her (Mindy is a Canadian citizen) with a false allegation of anti-American behavior. For a while, I drew pictures of her with an axe embedded in her head.

I wanted to fail Mindy. Her behavior, especially the way she assaulted me during the confrontation, was unacceptable. Looking back, I would have taken the case to the University’s Judicial Affairs office and had her expelled. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking clearly, and tried to “starve” her out of class by refusing to take her assignments. I then made an uneasy truce with her, but I still couldn’t stand to see her face for the rest of the semester. I gave her a B+ because I didn’t want to go through an appeal process. Mindy complained to the Professor Klein, the Chair, and I had to go to her office to explain that Mindy was often absent (which is not a reason to fail) and that she was not able to participate in class (the legally sound answer to why a student’s absences hurt their grade). Professor Klein listened carefully to what I said and never ordered me to change the grade. Mindy’s final grade was generous, given the circumstances.

To be continued…

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29
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 6)

In my last posts, I discussed how Professor K influenced my plans for the following spring semester of my “limbo year.” During the break between fall and spring semesters, I did not go on vacation from Joe.

At the end of the semester, I found out I got promoted to assistant editor. I had been doing the work all fall but signing my name on replies and rejection forms as SE, editorial assistant. Joe wanted me on board for the spring to typeset, although he could not promise me a living wage. Even though I was happy to declare the decade-long grocery career finished, there was still the issue of money.

I called a community college in the east county because their English department needed tutors for their writing center. I played phone tag with the professor in charge, but I was finally able to speak with her on the phone and get an interview. I took a few buses out to the college and met her. She was lovely and graceful, two qualities that are rare in Southern California. The interview went well and I had a job for the spring.

The university’s fall semester ended December 15. That same date was given as the deadline for submissions to the journal. After that ominous date, I took home some second-read submissions and checked the mailroom a few days later for any last-minute entries. I vaguely remember Christmas, but I remember taking the manuscripts to the beach to read and going to Joe’s house for a couple of meetings.

When I first showed Joe the first three pages of my hybrid work, he was encouraging. There were drawings of a glamorous figure surrounded by scribbling that filled the entire page. It grew into a short story and during the winter break, Joe gave me the name and e-mail address of an editor who just accepted one of his stories. I quickly e-mailed him the Word file of the story and mailed him photocopies of the drawings to scan. A week later, my work was accepted for publication.

That was not my only work that got published at the time. Joe wanted some artistic formatting done for one writer’s work, which was a series of one word stories, and he solicited me to do it. I took the writer’s words and played with them on Adobe Illustrator by twisting them into their shapes. I also decided to make a collage. I typed several word in a column in one page and I made a sheet by filling a word-processed page with “Plenty of White Space.” With a red Prismacolor pencil, I made bubbles for words on the white space page and cut them out, and pasted the two papers together. It was a bit disrespectful to the writer, but I experimented, seeing what could come out of it. I showed these renderings to Joe. He rejected all of the Illustrator generated submissions and accepted the collage. I was horrified. What if the writer took offense to it? These thoughts went through my mind, but I never objected. I was surprised by what Joe did next – he would credit me as a contributor to the journal. In addition to being a published writer, I would also be a published artist.

I housesat for Joe twice. The first time was during the winter break during one weekend when Joe and his girlfriend drove out to spend a weekend in the desert. I was delighted. I lived at home at the time and it would give me an opportunity to get away from my family. Joe had a ranch style home near the university with an extensive library of books and a living room that was a comfortable place to read with a view of the canyon. My only responsibility was to make sure the bird feeders were filled. Joe was an avid bird watcher and, inside the living room, he would sweetly greet the finches and jays that flew in to the back yard to feed. Making sure the birds were taken care of was no problem. It did not take me long to put the seeds and nuts where they should go and I was able to get on with what I needed to do that day.

The second time I housesat for Joe, he was gone for a few lectures on the East Coast for a week early in the spring semester. I knew the routine from the last time. I fed the birds every morning and I started my day. I took the bus to work and I got to walk to the university for my classes. Since both my classes were with Joe, he appointed Tomas, my predecessor as assistant editor, to proctor them. I made myself very much at home. I did not leave clothes or books strewn all over the place, but I took the vodka he kept in the freezer and tried to make homemade martinis. While I went through his refrigerator looking to for a snack, I found some cookies wrapped in foil hidden in the back. I pulled them out to eat one, but I couldn’t just have one. Though the taste was bitter and suspiciously familiar, I ate them until there were no more and then I had to keep eating. I wasn’t hungry, but I just wanted to continually chew on something. I chewed on pretzel sticks and carrots without taking a break. I sat down to read a book, but couldn’t because the living room started to spin like a dryer. I got up and went to Joe’s bedroom and looked at myself in the mirrored closet door, and my reflection looked like an image from high resolution TV. I then laughed, passed out, and slept for many hours. The hangover lasted for a couple of days. When Joe returned from his trip, his girlfriend called me to make sure I was ok because she was afraid something bad could have happened to me, considering how many cookies I ate. When I asked her what was in the cookies, she said it contained “special ingredients.” Though I had my suspicions of what it was (and I knew later), her answer was good enough for the time. And, dear reader, that answer has to be good enough for you.

When I created my hybrid story, I thought it would be a one-time thing only. In the first one, the narrator is sexually abused by his psychiatrist and he retreats further into fantasy, especially with his glamorous heroine. At the beginning of the spring semester, I created a sequel. The young man would be avenged by the glamorous woman coming down from Los Angeles and kicking the psychiatrist’s ass. This too had both words and images, and Joe allowed me to amend my MFA application portfolio by submitting it to the English Department. Even though my portfolio met the required 30 pages, Joe felt this piece would strengthen it. It certainly must have.

To be continued…

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28
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 5)

In my last post, I discussed the first half of the “limbo year,” ending with Professor K showing signs of possessiveness towards me.

I would decide not to take Tatiyana’s class, much to my regret, because it was her final semester at the University. A premature departure, I heard through some sources that she was forced to leave because she became involved with her thesis student. The evidence was difficult to conceal since it was growing in her belly. It never bothered me because it was a consensual relationship. She didn’t force some poor kid to take his pants off and rape him – the student was an intelligent and capable man in his late twenties. Joe, on the other hand, dated a woman after she took his class and she lived with him while earning her BA and MA at the University. This too was consensual and Joe never got in any kind of trouble for it. Joe was tenured, but Tatiyana was not. Gender very well could be an issue as well, since a woman is more likely to be punished for a sexual transgression than a man. Despite this, Tatiyana was allowed to be on the MFA admissions committee during her “lame duck” semester.

Since I was acquainted with Tatiyana from a couple of reading events, she gave me the news concerning my application when I saw her on the campus early in the spring semester. Joe had already told me that I was accepted, but Tatiyana was very pleased to give me the news, telling me I deserved it. Joe would later tell me that the committee was uninamous when it came to my application – he, Tatiyana, and Professor Beltran were in agreement. I found Tatiyana’s news delivery, and later Joe’s anecdote, to be assuring because Joe did not have to bully the rest of the committee or politic with one member or the other to get me admitted.

While Joe would vigorously deny this, he likes it when students are in his orbit. Take classes with him, be involved with his projects, party with him – what a student needs out of this gets lost or becomes irrelevant. I never sensed that a student’s growth as a writer or reader was important to Joe. Some of his favorite students were exceptionally literate, while most of them hardly read at all and thought his writing was utterly amazing. Granted, he is better than the average open-miker (and even some of his charges), but he doesn’t hold up to Literature. He’s good at talking as if his work does. Even though I was never a fan of his work, I had a symbiotic relationship with Joe. I took his workshops and worked for him while he was my ally in the English department. I let him cheat me out of studying with Tatiyana because I followed his cue too well. During my first year in the program, Professor Beltran taught a class on William Blake, one of my literary heroes. I mentioned to Joe that I was interested in taking the course, and Joe spoke in a roundabout manner how Beltran could not effectively teach Blake. I listened to him.

To be continued…

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27
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 4)

In my last post, I discussed my early academic relationship with Joe AKA Professor K and how he sought to get me into the program after I proved to be useful to him. Here I’ll continue to discuss the “limbo year,” where I had completed most of the requirments for my degree and was taking graduate courses with Professor K.

What I did not mention was during that fall semester of working for Joe and studying with him in his graduate course was I was also completing the requirements for my BA that semester. I had applied for graduation the previous semester and was declined due to not having enough units. I called the evaluations office and objected. I carried over 100 units and they accepted 70 when I transferred to the university from a local community college. I hoped I could have some of those units count, but they did not find that acceptable. They wanted me to take these units at the university. Since I had satisfied all the catalog requirements for my degree, the evaluation office did not care what classes I took as long as they were at the university.

Joe offered a course on creative writing that summer, but I was not able to take it. I was working at a supermarket at the time and my schedule there would not allow it. A co-worker’s husband was terminally ill and she took an indefinite leave of absence from my department. I remember feeling extremely disappointed that I could not attend Professor K workshop. It would have been a change for me to show him my writing. Though I only knew him for a short period, Professor K became a paternal figure to me. He certainly reminded me of my father, especially with his dry sense of humor. I had never had a good relationship with my father, even when we had managed to get along, so it was easy for me to look to other men to fulfill that role. The class would have been an opportunity to become closer, to get to know Joe, but this would happen very quickly in the fall.

I did, however, take a course on world religions and another on European history. I was already registered in these course when my co-worker’s crisis occurred, so my department head made allowances in the schedule for me. Since my classes were in the morning and afternoon, I could work evenings. On the other hand, Professor K’s class was during the evening, and my co-worker’s situation made everyone else’s scheduling situations very insane. Nonetheless, I kept in touch with Professor K.

During the fall semester, I still had to play the units game for my BA. I enrolled in two English courses – The Tragic Vision and Science Fiction. Since I was still an undergrad, I had to get an add code from Professor K in order to take his Form and Theory course. Science Fiction was absolutely wonderful. I was first exposed to one of my favorite writers in that course: Ursula K Le Guin. We also read Samuel Delaney, Alfred Bester, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. The professor (I’ll call him Henry O’Donough) was a respected expert on post-modernism and we also read his anthology, which contained essays, short stories, and novel excerpts from philosophers, theorists, and literary and science fiction writers. Henry always held bar hours on Thursday evenings, and I showed up to most of them. The Tragic Vision was, well, tragic. Three hours of Tuesday afternoons were always lost to boredom and professorial pedantry. Dr. Tsongas obviously knew a lot and he droned on and on, but he could also be mean. Towards the end of the semester, I missed the deadline for one of the final assignments and he upbraided me in front of class for it. He did, however, let me turn it in late. I had that end of the semester burnout and I wanted to bail out on the Tragic Vision course altogether. One morning, when I was at the office, I talked to Joe on the phone and confided to him my impulse to leave the Tragic Vision course and fail it. He told me to hang in there and to finish it, especially since my application to the MFA program was at stake. I showed up to the final and got a B in the course. The units game was then over.

For thirteen years, I worked for one of the major supermarket chains in San Diego. I paid for my college education with my salary and the employment also provided me with medical and dental benefits. I hated working there, but the pay and benefits kept me working. I spent seven years in the bakery department working the closing shift. I went to school during the day (occasionally an evening) and worked in the evening. I packed baked goods that were not taken care of before I arrived and put them out on the sales floor, took cake orders, sold pastries and last minute cakes, and cleaned up the bakery before I left. I mopped floors every night to pay for my tuition and I was tired of it. The chain was in its first year of a merger with a new parent company and the changes were hard to keep up with. In October, when the changes seemed the most unreasonable, I put in my two-week notice and wrote that I was leaving to complete my BA. One manager empathetically told me many others were putting in their notices. Once I worked my last day, a good friend of mine picked me up to see Bjork’s awful movie and I never looked back.

During mid-December, Joe and Tatiyana, the visiting writer to MFA program, did a reading at the Cottage, located on the northwestern part of the university, right off the Mall. Before the reading, Joe and I discussed my plans for the spring semester. Joe was offering a course entitled “Madness In Literature;” however, I wanted to take Tatiyana’s fiction workshop and the problem was that both Joe and Tatiyana’s courses were offered on Tuesday nights. When Joe asked me if I was going to take his “Madness” course, I told him I wanted to take Tatiyana’s. Joe became very quiet, and I sensed it was out of jealousy. Even though he was friendly towards Tatiyana, some of my friends told me Joe felt Tatiyana stole some of his students. That silence only lasted a few seconds. It would be a year and a half before Joe gave me a longer silence. I would make the decision to enroll in Joe’s course.

To be continued…

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26
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 3)

In my last post, I mentioned a specific university job that was nightmarish. Mindy Shatner (not her real name) made my first semester of teaching a living hell. Hopefully, she’s got some of that karma coming back to her if she teaches in grad school. Before Ms. Shatner, there was Professor Joseph K. Needless to say, it’s not his real name. My first university job was working for him, and that became nightmarish towards the end.

My MFA career began during my senior period in undergraduate school. It would be a year and a half until I was matriculated in the graduate creative writing program, but I say it began during my senior year because that was when I met Professor Joseph K. I enrolled in his upper division 20th Century American literature course. His choice of books was definitely unconventional. Apart from the somewhat canonical Langston Hughes, we read poems by Joy Harjo and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Bloods, a transcription of oral narratives of the Vietnam War, sparked discussion. We also read two of Professor K’s books – his own collection of short stories centering on murderers and sexually unconventional people, and a university press journal (centered on “innovative fiction”) edited by Professor K himself. Even though I was not impressed with Professor K’s book, I was intrigued with his journal. His text selections represented the zeitgeist, and I enjoyed reading them and contributing to the class discussion. Somehow, I had an impact on Professor K. During one office meeting, he invited to take a graduate course he was offering for the following semester. As a senior, I was honored. He thought that much of me, but some bigger surprises were to come.

Professor K picked a small group of students from the American literature class to become part of his editorial team, and I was among the elite. Once again, I was honored that he chose me as he explained to us in his office that he valued our skills as readers and critics and that we had a lot to offer his journal. After the course was over, I kept in touch with Professor K during the following summer and visited his home for a journal party before the start of the fall semester. I was only one of two people who showed up from our class and everyone else present were graduate students. Professor K introduced me to the group as an excellent writer and critic, which definitely raised my confidence.

During the start of the fall semester, the assistant editor simply became unavailable to do his duties due to the demands of graduate school and his marriage. Since he could not keep office hours for the journal, I stepped in and Professor K gave me keys to his office and the mailroom. I processed the submissions and issued them to the readers, delivered Professor K’s mail to his desk, and read and recommended manuscripts to Professor K. He trusted my opinion, but he did not always accept my suggestions. Though I was not getting paid, I enjoyed the work because I was valuable. By the end of the semester, Professor K gave me the title of assistant editor.

Sometime during that semester, I stopped calling him Professor K and started to call him Joe. Everyone who worked with him was on a first name basis with him, so I felt I should too. While my relationship with Professor K was congenial, my relationship with Joe would be stormy after my admission into the MFA program. When I was in his upper division course, I mentioned my interest in the program. Professor K was skeptical because he had not seen any samples of my fiction. When I took his graduate literature course, he gave a lot of creative response exercises. I enthusiastically kept a journal. Actually, it was an 11×17 sketchpad. I wrote in it, but I also did visual art response – collages, drawings, and a hybrid work that would grow into my thesis. I showed Joe the first three pages of the seminal work and his reaction surprised me. He said it was good.

While Joe could not guarantee me a seat, he wanted me to apply to the program. He had seen my work and I was working for him. Somehow, I suspect the latter was more important. His former assistant was transitioning out of the program, so Joe hoped to continue the working relationship he had with me. He had me show him what I had compiled for my application portfolio. Several of my exercises comprised a bulk of it, while only one early story of mine made it. My stories about a crazy Japanese auntie figure seemed too tame. Joe also grilled me on who I would get letters of recommendation from (besides him). It was a given that he would write on my behalf. I mentioned one creative writing instructor I had as an undergraduate and he did not like her at all. I mentioned another, and this one had more credibility with Joe. To satisfy the requirement of three letters, I went through few choices with Joe on literature professors, and I settled with asking a professor I took British and Romantic literature courses with. He agreed. I wrote my statement of purpose and e-mailed it to Joe a few times. Each time, I was able to refine it due to Joe’s correction. Once the application package was complete, I mailed it from a post office that was only two hundred feet from the English Department.

To be continued…

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26
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School (Part 2)

In my last post, I mentioned some university jobs and their basic challenges to grad students. The job mentioned in this post is one job that posed challenges to me at one point in my MFA career:

Sometimes, the jobs can be nightmarish. During my undergraduate career, I have long dreamed about becoming a creative writing teacher. I was so passionate about this subject because discovering writing was like a religious conversion. Throughout high school, I never had confidence in my ability to write. It was in a freshman literature course that sparked my interest. I read C.S. Lewis novels on my own at the time, but writing about short stories, poems, and plays also sparked my interest. A few semesters later, I worked up the courage to take a creative writing course, and my life has never been the same since. Since I had help in becoming a writer, I wanted to help other young writers as well. When I had the opportunity to teach lower division creative writing, my dream came true, even if the pay was lousy. I was filled with hope and ambition with how I was going to teach the class. I was not going to be like my first creative writing teacher, that jerk who ripped student’s works to shreds, killing them as writers in the process. I envisioned myself as their bodhisattva. I would nurture them and lead them to enlightenment in writing fiction and creative writing. However, experience of teaching was not what I expected. I only connected with a handful of students. In their varying levels of talent, they brought their interest and their desire to learn. One student was a joy to have because of his intelligence. Another brought her talent and joy (despite her many absences). Another applied her Marine Corp discipline to the crafts of fiction and poetry and I gladly gave her my time outside of class to help her. A conscientious man was my ally because he was the only thirty-something student in the class. Most seemed indifferent. They seemed to elsewhere, in side conversations, not caring about the subject. Many never read the assigned works. I vaguely remember them, but the student who was downright hostile is definitely indelible.

I don’t remember when the hostility began or whose fault it was. She definitely made a bad impression with her early departures. She was smug, sure of herself, and definitely too smart for me. She was a college senior intellectually slumming it in a class for freshmen and sophomores. She was taking graduate course, one or two upper division courses, and my course. Sometimes she was above me and my topics; other times she looked at me with contempt. And for someone at her level, she had the worst classroom etiquette. She often talked while I was speaking or made noises while I wrote on the chalkboard, my back turned to the class. I often responded in kind – directly telling her to be quiet. This only made the situation worse. When I confronted her after class about a side conversation she had with a classmate and warned her about the consequences, she accused me of persecuting her. As I tried to hold my ground in the discussion, she became more belligerent. I told her we would have a discussion with the department head the next time it happened and she bellowed at me that she had a lot to tell her about my teaching ability. She then stormed out of the classroom.

I left the class shaking. By the time I walked to the library, I was in tears. I went to the English department and hoped to find the Chair in her office. She was away on a conference. I spent the next hour talking to the graduate advisor. She listened, gave me anecdotes of other graduate students who also had students treat them terribly, and humorously refer to my student as a “bastress.” I always chuckle when I think of that word. I went home and did not go to the literature seminar later that evening. One or two more absences occurred because I was extremely stressed out. I wrote reports to the Chair about the incident and stated I was going to fail her; my student also e-mailed complaints to her. The student sent me an extremely long e-mail about the issue, and, in the end, I declared an uneasy truce with her.

I nearly failed the graduate seminar because of my absences. I did not communicate with the professor at all until I was ready to return to class. I knew my grade and my seat in the program were in jeopardy, so I sent the professor a “mea culpa” e-mail apologizing for my absences and explaining my reasons for them. Because this professor had been a significant part of my undergraduate career, he expressed his disappointment and displeasure in his reply, but he was willing to meet me and discuss what could be done about me and my grade. He said that he had observed that I seemed distracted with teaching before the absences. My reading essays were not what they could be and I was not as present in the course. In the end, I was allowed to finish the course with a satisfactory grade, even if my paper had to be turned in late.

My thesis chair, who mentored my creative writing class, also observed that the experience was not good for me. I was working extremely hard teaching the class, much to my detriment as a writer. I found it difficult to focus on my own creative writing and he commented that the quality was declining. He also noticed the lack of reading. I evaded the topic of books, but it was something he was able to see in my language. I was shocked by his frankness, especially when he said the school was exploiting me. It made me angry because it brought me back to when I felt exploited as a writing tutor and as a professor’s assistant. I was only paid $343 a month that semester and it felt like I was doing $1292 worth. I was in the program to write fiction and I was hardly writing at all.

To be continued…

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26
May 06

If You Want To Go To Grad School…

If you want to go to grad school, run! Run as hard and as fast as you can away from the idea. If you picked up an application during a campus visit, put it down and walk away. If you had already sent to the university for an application, put the thing in the shredder. If you’re on the university’s website and have accessed the online application, type in another URL and do something else. Shop, look at porn, have cybersex, or do whatever else you like to do online. Just don’t go to another university’s website.

This advice applies if you’re considering an academic master’s or doctorate degree or you’re aimless after getting that BA or BS. Of course, there is something fun about extending a college career. The parties are better and the professors will drink with you. Oh, and there is this thing called work. For the truly dedicated who someday wish to become professors themselves, there are plenty of coveted, but low paying jobs. For $200-$600 a month, grad students can expect to work as a tutor, an assistant to a professor, or a TA (which could either stand for [student] teaching associate or teaching assistant). During my time earning an MFA in creative writing, I worked as a writing tutor, an assistant to an English professor, a lower division creative writing instructor, a TA attached to an Intro to Literature lecture class, and even as an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of these jobs were in the $200 to $340 range each, and perhaps came to $600 if several were combined. My adjunct instructor job during my thesis semester was wonderful. I would have to work several of the university jobs for what I got paid to teach developmental writing at the community college.

Pay was only one issue of the grad school gigs. For the compensation offered, these jobs were extremely demanding. Tutoring students took a great deal of emotional and intellectual resources. Teaching lower division courses, of course, required lesson plans, attention to student work, and patience that is definitely required of high school teachers. One has to read the material, create assignments, grade papers, and interact with friendly or hostile students. While the professor takes care of lessons for a lecture class, the TA still has a lot of work. One has to work with one or two groups of students from the class (which can be up to 60 people), facilitate discussions, and give tests and quizzes (some TA’s even give homework). While the professor lectures, the TA is essentially responsible for the student’s grade. However, the professor can overrule the grades if she sees fit. The student workers must shoulder the responsibilities of their jobs in addition to the work required of them in their graduate courses. While graduate programs come with obligations to read, study hard, and write well, students often work to meet more basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.

To be continued…

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