seeing clearly...

This is it. The last blog entry for this class, and though I am excited that this semester is coming to an end, I am not as excited that this class is almost over. The readings for this week’s blog were interesting in that they voiced some of the same questions I have asked over the past six years of my professors and myself. The articles gave me some answers and yet provided ideas for discussion that I have not thought of before.

As everyone knows, general education requirements include a combination of classes, which include English Literature. When it was time for me to take this class, I chose English Lit I. My experience as a reader was at that time much the same as described in the articles for today. I love to read, but I had never learned how to read analytically. I thought that was all I needed to learn to get through college and if I had chosen another field of study then that would be all I needed. The first time I took a Creative Writing Forms class I realized I had to learn how to read as a writer. It took me two years to get to the point I am at now in learning this valuable skill, and yet I believe there is more I need to learn. This is evident when I sit through workshops and some of my peers see things that I failed to notice when reading the pieces of my peers.

I did not realize that the line between being a teacher and a student of writing is so thin. I know now that the objective to learning the craft of writing is not something one ever stops working towards. Knowing this now, I understand that the very professors who teach me every semester are still learning as I am. Over the past three years, I have tutored writing at the elementary level and this experience has helped me to experience this juggling between teacher and student even more. The important thing to remember is that to keep my own process of learning from future students would allow them to believe in the idea that their professors know everything about writing.

When I started writing, again I had not formal training, had read one book on writing, and only had my childhood experiences to pull from to finish my first book. Along the way, I learned that I knew more than I thought about the writing craft but did not have the terminology to talk about the processes and techniques I used. In the beginning, it was like looking through a dense fog. I could see the edges and yet still not make out what I was before me. In a way, this was my way of describing what the articles discussed. We come to the creative writing classroom with this feeling of ‘magic’ writing, we learn and read which causes the fog to lift slowly, and then we realize along the way that what was hiding in the fog was not ‘magic’ but the foundation we needed in order to build.

The important thing to remember is that as teachers we need to guide our students helping them find the same tools we found in the fog and that we will never stop learning.