teach me
saturday, june 29, 2002


i taught my first online workshop today. mind you, it was on an easy to teach subject (punctuation), but i feel pretty good about it. they want me to teach it again, so i'm thinking i might offer it just once a month, rotating the times a bit so different people in different places have the opportunity to come and participate. while online is different than r.l., as far as i'm concerned any kind of practice is good practice when it comes to teaching. this allows me to work out the bumps in my notes and add info for questions that seem to come up more often. and it might help me judge time needed a little as well. tonight we went over by a half an hour. good thing no one else needed the room!

if it continues to go well, i'm thinking of adding an immediate fiction workshop to my teaching schedule over there (hl's - a writing community i visit a lot). at least, if they will allow a so far unpublished writer to do that. i don't get paid for it, at least not in cash value, but i think the experience is invaluable for me.

monday the new workshop, discovering fiction, starts it's first session. i'm really looking forward to it too! our first book is immediate fiction by jerry cleaver. just the prologue really rocked! i hope the rest of the book is just as cool! there's still a few openings if anyone is interested, but once the session starts, no new applications are accepted for the current session so you better sign up tonight or tomorrow! i'm already looking at the next session and considering a book on writing dialogue or a book called word painting. i get too excited about these things - i really need to wait and see how the first session goes before i plan the next!

another thing i have to do when i get a chance to is to start working on my teaching file. i have a bunch of writing lessons created by students from the one grad class i took i need to retype into my own format first, then i need to start collecting other lesson material and short stories and essays to use in class. i may never need it, but i'd rather have it and be prepared than to find myself in some kind of permanent or semi-permanent position and without anything!

now, if only someone can only teach me how not to keep coming up with new ideas of things to do. maybe then i'd get some of the stuff already on my list done!