A Fictional class on Fiction

I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy any of the class work more than I enjoyed putting together my visual essay, and I hadn’t thought that any of them would challenge me as much, but I was wrong. While the essay forced me to examine how I learned, it also forced me to learn to use technology that I have had at my fingertips for about a year and had never even opened before this class; the assignment sequence challenged me to start thinking about how I would teach a class. I have known for sometime that what I want to do is teach English at the college level, and I have had some ideas of things I want to do in my classrooms, but I had never really given much thought to how I would implement my ideas into a classroom. This project really forced me to look at what it is that I want to teach, and how I would be able to use the ideas, knowledge, and skills the students would come to me with in order to do so.

I was really excited about the assignment and created three different fictional classes before finally settling on working with a creative writing fiction class. I ended up making the choice to use fiction because after many attempts at creating the syllabi for the three classes I quickly found that the fiction class most enabled me to work with the parts of writing that I hope to teach the students I will one day have, idea generation and the power of language. In the end what I realized is that building on the knowledge the students have when they come to me would be one of the many ways to help them create their writing and to create the vocabulary with which to talk about their writing, and part of the knowledge and skill set they will bring to my class is their ability to use and understand technology, and this element of technology and what it tells us about our world is something I should find ways to bring into the course work.