Fallensnow pointed me to another site similar to the confessions site: Post Secret. At this one, you have to mail in your secret on a handmade postcard. There are some great postcards on there.
While I was browsing the site I came across this card, which made me laugh at first. But then I stopped laughing and wondered whether what you really want in a creative writing teacher might be a good reader.
What do you think? I have never taken a creative writing course and probably never will,1 but I'd love to hear from any of you who have. How was your teacher? Did the course help you? How did it help?
1. I'm not quite sure what creative writing is, to tell the truth. Isn't all writing creative? And if it means fiction writing, why isn't it called fiction writing?
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- Badaunt
- I'm from NZ, and now live in Japan, teaching English to reluctant university students. Email me: badaunt at gmail.com
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Links for language teachers
I have noticed that I get a lot of hits from people searching "present simple" and "ESL," and assume that this is language teachers looking for ideas or lesson plans. The following links are good places to start.
ESL Lounge Here you will find lesson plans organised by level. A fantastically useful site for busy teachers, and easy to navigate.
British Council Here lesson plans are organized by topic. There are more teaching activities in the 'downloads' section.
The Internet TESL Journal
They have not updated this page for a while, but there is still a lot you might find useful.
Humanising Language Teaching
This is an online journal, good for ideas, inspiration, and especially good towards the end of semester when you're feeling not quite human.
Dave's ESL Cafe
Almost too much to wade through, but a very useful resource. Lots of links to other sources.
Karin's ESL PartyLand
This is a page specifically dealing with teaching simple present and present progressive. I have not tried any of these, but there are a lot of ideas here, and they look good. At the very least you will be inspired.
Good luck!
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7 comments:
What an astonishing site.
I guess creative writing covers fiction, poetry and screenwriting at a level (anything non-fiction?).
But I've never been on a course, I'm quite happy making it up myself.
P.S. I totally agree with your recent comment on my site about the size of my poll (ooer missus!). I'm addressing this issue at the moment ;-)
Why have a blog if you can't have a little fun eh!
I've taken creative writing courses all through school, from elementary on up to college. They were only useful to me in two ways--they force me to write and they showed me that a lot of people are complete idiots and I shouldn't worry about them. I did have one teacher who was really insightful and an excellent reader. He knew all the right questions to ask to get me to write better descriptions. Overall I've become very frustrated with creative writing classes, espescially those that work on a writer's workshop concept. I find workshopping to be a waste of time because people are afraid to really question your writing and help it get better, yet they want you to do that for them. Then when you do make comments about things that could be improved they get pissy about it.
Carrie (queenoframbles)
My experience is pretty much like Carrie's. I didn't mind the WS at school so much cuz the teacher would keep it on track and add helpful comments, but I find online workshops to be useless. I do find it beneficial to "hang out" with writers online though. Sometimes they give tips directly; other times they find great links. It keeps me going, even when we arent't directly discussing WIPs.
I have seen this site before. Some of them are really powerful
I took several short story writing classes, an expository writing course and a poetry workshop when I was a university student and I've also taken several online writing courses. All of them were useful to me in their own way, but none of them resulted in any published work. It actually takes a few tries simply to learn how to get something out of the experience and each time you do it it gets easier because you approach it with more realistic expectations. Primarily courses give you an audience and hopefully some feedback. You have a deadline which creates a certain amount of pressure, but you also have enough structure so that you can focus on achieving a particular effect. Courses also allow the creative writing instructor to think and interact more like an editor than a writer which is often useful for the creative writing instructor. Academic fiction writing has a built-in master-apprentice dynamic modeled after the guild system, so if you can successfully tailor your work it can help a published writer help you, an unpublished writer, in getting published, assuming you wish to be associated with your mentor. Such seriousness can sometimes be more of a drain on creativity than a stimulus. Instructors will also sometimes use students by tapping into their creativity knowing that the students lack the experience and technique to create a finished product, a sort of vampire effect.
Thanks for the replies, everybody. Creative writing classes sound rather scary to me - keeping a blog is fun, but that sounds like work! (Which is why I'm not a published writer.)
I rather like the vampire effect idea. You could get a short story (at least) out of that, surely!
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