Second semester always sneaks up on me. The craziness that is Winterim--regardless of what I teach--eats up all of the bandwidth and anticipation of the next semester, so I'm never really ready for it to start. It also means that I see some of my students for the first time in five weeks (two weeks for Winter Break, three weeks for Winterim). I look over the pictures of each class to make sure I remember everyone's names, it's that long.
Another big change that comes at the semester is that two of my sections reset. I teach two year-long classes and two semester-long, so the resetting is weird. Disclosure documents, introductions, the whole thing. Because we've been schooling for so long, it's strange to shift into that late-August mode at the end of January. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It gives me a chance to meet new kids, to put myself back into the joy of having variety in the curriculum, and--most importantly--it gives me my novel writing class. I teach Creative Writing I during the first semester, which ends at the Winter Break midway through December. Most of the kids who take that class are interested in writing, like me as a teacher, or have to fulfill an elective credit and mine fits their schedule. That's fine. I don't expect the class to be a life-changer for most of them. I try to entertain them, give them a class that doesn't demand as much of them, and gives them some positive memories of class activities or writing. Creative Writing II is also my Novel Writing class, and it's a creature of a different breed. First of all, my CWI class is all about instruction, with one day of writing a week. CWII is reversed, one day of instruction, then every other day of the week is writing. This means that second semester is also the time when I get to write my own stories more, upwards of nearly three hours of writing a week. During the summer, I often get three hours a day, but during the school year, I'm lucky to get more than a couple. (That's part of the reason that I like NaNoWriMo so much, because it forces me to carve out more writing time.) But, as I said at the beginning, second semester sneaks up on me. One of the areas that I have to prepare before I'm ready to teach that class is my own outlining. In other words, my class prep is figuring out what book I'm going to write. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that prepping a new book is one of the hardest things for me to prepare. I haven't really written any fiction since NaNoWriMo 2017 ended. December was a hiatus, January was too video game-centric. Now I'm almost to February and I don't know what my new book is going to be about. This is problematic not only because I don't want to squander my rare writing time, but also because I have a goal to write three books this year. (So, okay, that isn't really a huge stretch of a goal: I want to write a book in Novel Writing class, one during the summer, and one during NaNoWriMo 2018. But, also, that's a huge amount of writing. So it balances out.) If I don't get my butt in gear, I don't know what I'll have at the end of the school year, but it certainly won't be a new book. Today was the first day of the class trying to write together. It was rough, as the kids were chatty and there were teacher issues I had to deal with. But you know what? I wrote over 600 words of fiction today. They're from the horror story that I was working on earlier in the school year but haven't touched since October. I had to reread my notes, skim over previous chapters, and try to get my head on straight again, but the important thing is, I did it. I'm moving forward on this goal. Now…if I could convince myself that I love to edit, then I'd really be getting somewhere with my writing. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|