I love my job teaching high schoolers creative writing after school. So much. I wish I actually got paid for it, and that I could do it more than once a week. I so needed the class I had today. I've been feeling rough for weeks, and this kind of just redeemed me. Like: here it is, here's what I want to do. This has got to be it.
I'm really glad that I decided to keep the class size small. I have five students, and we meet in the board room of the library every Monday. We've only had like three meetings so far, but, tonight, everyone really opened up and chatted and bonded. It was our first real workshop, so I think that got everyone talking. Class time was over at six, and I noticed we had ran over like five minutes. When I mentioned it, they all shrugged it off and said they wanted to stay longer and talk. So I stayed a half an hour over, and we talked books, books-to-movies, hooks, endings, character development--a little bit of everything. They opened up and told me that they were glad for the class, because it was a really nice, close-knit environment, and they felt like they were learning a lot and actually wanted to do the work. Which, for real, just made me ridiculously happy.
I was really worried that I wasn't doing enough or saying enough or even impressing them in the slightest bit, so it was really something for me to hear them praise the class. I like to think that we are all well on our way to becoming friends too, and not just students and teacher. Which they did tell me it was nice that I was so approachable, and, seeing as how I'm only five years out of high school, I still know all the teachers and even had some of the same assignments they were telling me about. So it helps.
I think what really impressed/surprised me was when I asked them if they wanted holidays like today (when there was no school) off, and all of them said no, that they looked forward to the class, which is great, because I do too. I like my other jobs, but I'm actually excited to go in on Mondays and talk to them. I mean, I'm doing it for free, and it doesn't even feel like a job. It's like a nice little hour and a half-long escape for me. It's the next best thing to being on campus in Murray, with the added reward of feeling like I'm helping someone get closer to their goal. I know how important it was for me when I was in high school and people took special interest in helping me out.
So, anyway, now that I've rambled about that, I should probably also take a moment to cheer a bit about having two poems picked up by an online magazine. =) However, I have not yet decided if I am going to post the link to them when they're published, because, uh, well, they're a little M-rated. One more so than the other, but it felt right for the character and message I was trying to portray. I guess I can't hide forever from the fact that people are going to read things I write and interpret them in certain ways and maybe be a little bit disgruntled by the fact that I am not exactly what I might appear to be. But all human life is gritty and M-rated to some degree, so I'm not really ashamed of it. I just want to be real and true to the experiences. It's kind of like I told my students today, about how you had to discover the voice of you character and talk like they would talk, think like they would think.
And now it's time for to work on my own revisions before I hit the hay.
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