teaching
April 24, 2009
- Patrick "Packy" Mader will begin his spring and summer programs near his roots, at Trista Days on Saturday, May 16. Minnetrista is a city between the towns of Mound and St. Bonifacius and is where the farm is located that Packy lived and worked at for many years. Please come and celebrate rural traditions and meet with Packy and share your own stories!The Heartwarming Stories of the ...
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April 22, 2009
- When I walked into my first class yesterday, it was clear all the students were still on spring break. The stared at me, waiting for something, maybe an electrical impulse through a prod of some kind to hit their brains. They blinked, listening to me drone on about the last month of school. They stared, no one raising a hand. They didn't even really talk amongst themselves, so stuned by ...
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April 20, 2009
- Hi, I'll be teaching this July at the 2009 Iowa Summer Writing Festival in lovely Iowa City, IA. Come join me there. This is what I'll be doing:Advanced Novel Workshop, July 5-10Taking the Breaks Off: How to Begin Your Novel, July 12-17How to Create Characters, Or Why it Takes Two to Tango, July 18-19 Here's a link for more ...
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April 12, 2009
- To MFA or not to MFA, that is the question. Whether tis nobler to remain minimally debt free and unburdened of the pretentions of the teaching class; or to submit to the whims and fancies of a few with expertise in search of credential, terminal writing degree, and perhaps greater opportunity if not greater debt.I love writing and have gained immense pride from being able to respond ...
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April 8, 2009
- I often joke that if you want to be a writer, you should first be an opera singer. I was most fortunate to learn character development, dramatic arc, tension and resolution from having sung so many opera roles, and from having been coached by some great artists and teachers. Now that I write stories and novels, I find I've internalized those lessons, so that there's a feeling in my gut when I ...
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March 27, 2009
- (Cross-posted with TaniaWrites)I find as I grow into this writing life, things shift and change, and the latest shift is towards something I have been thinking about for a while: only submitting my stories to literary journals that pay. Before I carry on, I want to stress that I certainly don't subscribe to the school of thought that submitting to non-paying journals is somehow "giving away ...
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March 20, 2009
- I'm reading three different plays in my freshman comp classes: Take Me Out, Speed-the-Plow, and The Seagull. After last semester's debacle with Hamlet and the entirely non-native speaking class, I decided to give the bard the semester off (despite his new look) and read plays that I love and that I've seen produced, two of them twice. No more, I believed, would their be any confusion. No ...
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March 19, 2009
- I’m glad no one took my blood pressure as I watched “The Class,” for it would have been soaring. The movie – which takes place almost completely inside a high school on the edge of Paris – is great (as nearly all reviewers agree). So it wasn’t the quality of the film that nearly gave me a stroke.I’d done two site visits that day, watching WritersCorps teaching artists share poetry ...
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March 14, 2009
- I get furious when I hear the talk about "bad teachers" being the major problem with American education. The major problem is bad students: belligerent, lazy, overly entitled, lacking discipline, incompetemt, self-satisfied, and sometimes downright dangerous.
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March 6, 2009
- I expect a lot of you who read this little blog are also teachers, and I wonder if there's a commonality in our experience. I seem to have spent my life teaching--voice, diction, repertoire, opera theater, and now various aspects of writing--but I never feel that I've actually gotten there, that I've really learned how to share what's in my mind to share. And yet--my students from all these ...
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