New school stories are just low intensity cosmic horror.
Write about a character in a new strange situation
yeah… school for me at least was a race to the bottom. Test scores and homework quotas superseded teaching creativity or critical thinking.
In a roundabout way it disillusioned me right quick and taught me how to creatively find ways to break their credits systems so I could be there as little as possible while still passing all the higher class tier mandatories.
well that’s just the risk you take if you decide to teach creative writing
Absolutely true. Creative writing attracts creative people. Expect the unexpected.
Still, it’s funny that this is about a little kid.
when i was in middle school we got an assignment in my English class (second language), something like “write about a day that isn’t yours”, it was supposed to be short, maybe half a page, a little story about your brother’s day, or maybe a day how you imagined your favourite actor to live. the teacher was cool and english was just starting to click for me, so i felt– the urge… i handed in 6 pages of a handwritten post-apocalyptic short story, detailing hour by hour the last day of someone living alone in a bunker and losing sanity as they begin to hear knocking at the door
thankfully i didn’t get penalised for being 5,5 pages over the limit :D
I got in deep shit because of a stupid “creative writing” project where the inciting incident was prewritten and you had to finish it. It was something like “you threw a rock and accidentally hit a car and dented it, and you felt terrible so…” , obviously bait for apologizing.
Fuck that. In mine the character refused to admit wrong-doing, went insane and was institutionalized and eventually lobotomized (a la jack Nicholson).
DEEP shit.
In the mid 90’s I was in a computer class and we had some really basic paint program that our teacher said we had to make a piece of art with that included a saying.
This was at the height of the Got Milk campaign so guess what everyone did, a cow or a glass with Got Milk as their slogan. Since we were allowed to listen to CDs with the CD ROM and a pair of headphones I popped in some Aerosmith and made a geometric man with a Dr Seuss hat and my slogan was “Reality is such a drag”.
The next day the teacher calls everyone but me up and gives them their B graded print out, then he calls me up and hands me mine with an A+ and says that’s for not doing got milk and actually being creative…by the way where did you come up with that? I told him I heard it on the Aerosmith album I was listening to, he grinned and asked if I liked Boston. I told him I hadn’t listened to them before, and the next day he had a Boston CD sitting at my desk when I sat down, turned out he had a book of CDs he kept in there and let me borrow anything I wanted during class for the rest of the year.
Good teachers can make such a big difference, and it’s almost always in these kinds of unquantifiable, “I just encouraged the student in the way they needed” kinds of ways. This, as much as anything else, is why defunding the education system is so criminal. Stressed-out, underpaid and overworked teachers just won’t have the mental space to do these kinds of things.
Stressed-out, underpaid and overworked teachers just won’t have the mental space to do these kinds of things.
Not only that, but teachers are now actively reprimanded for these kinds of interactions.
She wanted a “fish out of water” story and was handed a cephalopod in the jungle.
If she can’t see the symbolism in that story then she has no business being an English teacher.
OOP felt that they were talented and intelligent in their own way, but found themselves thrusted into an environment where none of that matters and they have to learn to even breathe…then spend the next two pages failing and succumbing to it.
