Please note: you will be reporting to a faculty adviser whose word trumps everything below.

You will be assigned three to five undergraduates, and you’ll meet with them three or four times during the
semester. No double dipping students must turn in new work (work that hasn’t been submitted in another class).
New work can include first drafts or revisions. The length of the work submitted can vary, of course, but
generally, fiction or prose should run 20-30 pages, poetry 10-15 pages or 10 poems, and drama, a one-act
play or several scenes per submission. If a student isn’t meeting these requirements, discuss it with the faculty
advisor.

Bob's answers to questions from fall 2003 CW 609 leaders.

What do you do when a student appears to be writing from a troubled or dangerous place?
Two very different places. If there seems to be any sign of danger, consult with Maxine or one of us. You don't
need to sort out this kind of problem on your own.

What if you don't want to help or even meet with a
particular student? (Writes admitted autobiography that caricatures you, your teaching, and your clothes.)
In this case, it seems that the student is challenging you. In some way, the workshop situation makes a trial
community. If a writer transgresses community standards (is racist, or simply insulting), he or she should experience
what the community has to say about that. That is, I don't think you can say, don't write that, but that doesn't mean
you have to treat an insulting piece of writing as though it were not insulting, or a racist piece of writing as though
it were not racist. The student should learn what the effect of his/her writing will be, that is part of his/her education
. So, perhaps in this instance, you can say, "Your writing is offensive to me, so don't expect me to meet with you
until you can come up with something better." Thus the student learns what happens when he or she offends the reader.

What do you do when a student is working on an experimental piece using music, artwork, cartoon, and
minimal writing (narrative)?
If it were just one or two instances during the semester, I would welcome it. And I would give graduate students
more room to pursue such a course. Is this a terribly brilliant undergrad or one who really needs to write more?
If the later, that is what I would ask for, and tell the student why: You need to write more to develop your writing skills.
 
Students treat me like a buddy, ignoring deadlines, arriving late to meetings, e-mailing stories despite clear
instructions not to, etc. Any suggestions?
Yes, hand out mid-term grades, with a paragraph explaining to these friendly students why they received B-'s or C's
or D's. That should do it. In your syllabus make it clear that late assignments will not be accepted. Or only one late
assignment for the semester. Or e-mailed stories will not be accepted. The reason for no late assignments is that the
assignments often make up the text for a writing class, they are part of the class process, not just a chapter to master,
like an assignment in a physics class. Then during the semester you can relent if a good student is sick, or whatever.
As for arriving late to meetings, perhaps you could end the meeting at the same time as you would have anyway.
When the student experiences a 6 minute meeting with you, he or she will be more prompt next time.
 
What do you do about flaky students? Help!
Often there is nothing to do. You can't fix them. Try to contain the damage to the class, and don't give them a good
grade. At least they should experience some reality principle. If someone is supposed to hand out a story, and does
not, that is the worst, because that transgresses a basic contract with the class. In that case, they simply lose their
turn on that round, and only if there is time at the end can they regain it. In a directed writing you might do the same
thing, with the idea that their grade goes down. That would need to be made clear to them in a syllabus.
 
Anything else you think we should know?
Yes. To paraphrase Tolstoy: happy students are pretty much the same, while troubled students are unique situations.
Drawing generalizations is hard. The main thing to remember is to bring your troubles to Maxine or to one of us, so
we can sort it out together. And sometimes it is simply the case that there is not much to do, that a problem must be
endured. I have certainly had that experience.

WSG asked Maxine what kind of feedback works best. She pointed out that the feedback that works best depends
on the individual student. Some will want prompts to get started; some will want lots of guidance, others less. The
best help is to give them ideas for what they're working on; give the student what their work requires. Treat everyone
respectfully. [Maxine phrased this better; my transcription skills aren't great. In essence, as Bob points out, there is
no single approach that will apply to every situation.] She also recommends you familiarize yourself with the services
available to students at the beginning of the semester, for the sake of you and for the sake of the undergraduates
working with you. Health services, emergency loans, and more are available.

 

Nona Caspers’s recommendations:

Read "Courage to Teach", read bell hooks on teaching (essays); read Beyond the Writer's Workshop; read books on teaching and communication. Also remember that the university offers counseling services--people who are educated and experienced in counseling 338.2208 for you and for your students!

Suggestions from graduate students who led CW 609 in fall 2003:

Hand out a syllabus on the first day.

Establish meeting schedule (once every 2-3 weeks) right away.

Set up minimum expectations of amount of work to be submitted.

E-mail writing exercises to students who seem stuck.

Learn about student psych services early that the school offers for free.

Read the University Bulletin for details about the number of weekly hours you are expected to put in
when you enroll in a three-credit class.

I'm letting my students grade themselves--that sobered them up!

My meetings were Q & A sessions with me asking the questions.

Be a hardass on the first day to scare the lazy away.

Beware flakiness!

Get students phone numbers!

Lay down ground rules at the beginning opposed to offering a "use my services as they needed" approach.
Two out of the five wrote a ton and wanted to meet almost every week, the other 3 were less prolific and
needed to be encouraged to produce. I have emailed out exercises and have written encouraging letters,
and have spoken to students on the phone who are having trouble. It wouldn't be a bad idea to suggest to
students who sign up for DW to have a few stories ready to submit before they sign up. One student said
to me on our first phone conversation that he "signed up to have an easy class," only to discover that he
didn't have anything to submit when the time came.

I learned that there are some students who are motivated are easy to work with. Others have less confidence
and are more tentative, requiring a different kind of appraisal: I found myself making more emphatic comments
about small successes and trying to spin exercises off those things than weighting the strength of the entire piece.

Certain students are very sensitive, and I found that sharing war stories of early workshops were good for
them to hear. Learning that sometimes brutal criticism exists (including the scorched earth variety) is as
important as hearing careful suggestions from someone who is not going to grind you into the dirt! I tried to
give the students confidence that they will soon learn to pick and choose what comments help and which need
to roll off their backs. Some of what I found myself doing was more of a pep talk than actually discussing
their piece.

Doing directed writing really was the best thing I did this semester. Talking to students about techniques and reading closely
 helped me solidify my thoughts about writing. I'd think of an  exercise in a vague/fun/game way and they'd try it, not just in
class but at home and get these great poems out of it. I'd be  jealous and have to work the exercises myself. They'd have books
 and ideas of their own, and I got them to read to me sometimes. Two of my stories this semester came out of appropriating my 
students’ books and techniques.I'm mainly a fiction writer but I had a really good time working with poets, learned a lot just from
having to teach them and asking about how they think. Students are amazingly open to working on whatever it is you're interested
 in. I had a list of six topics, and my students agreed to meet every other week to talk about them, which was wonderful and amazing, 
like a small dinner party. Having my students listen so closely gave me the confidence to broach some nerdy philosophy
questions with my peers. I have a feeling that few discussions will rival the ones I had with these kids. My students were clever
at finding what would please me and writing that and it did please me, so I had to remind them, okay we both know we are doing 
this for me, you're trying me on this semester but later you'll go out and try on other people. I tried to learn new things to catch 
up with them, like I read many pages about the lyric, and I tried to then tell my student about that and get her to learn it with me
but then I found out it was all crap.

Enjoy your students. Try to get something out of it for yourself. If you're having a good time then your students will have a good
 time. By the end my students were all clamoring to teach too, so increasingly I got to shut up and hear what they were picking up
 from, say Paul Hoover's class. If you respect and trust your students, you'll have to do less work, they'll give energy back. Don't
 forget you are a volunteer. It's a big time commitment. Try to get clear at the beginning about your boundaries with both the
 Creative Writing Department and your students. You are under no obligation to take more students than you can handle. Certainly
 there's a responsibility to the students, but it's up to you to work out with your student how often to meet and what kind of work 
you do. It's fairly rare to be able to work so closely one on one, and one student more or less isn't going to break the department.
 This is a chance to give a San Francisco State student "quality time", so don't ruin it by overbooking. 

At the beginning of the directed writing, two of my students had fallen into bad holes. (I had known both a little before, so I knew
 they could do better.) I was honest with them about that (and they knew it too). One girl who was good at language had written
 three stories without using language and we had to start over using just one line from the old draft, which I was scared about telling
 her, but it really worked. The old draft seeped back in by itself, which gave me the courage to do a similar thing to a story of my own 
that had fallen down some bad stairs. My other student came to me first with her worries and her breakthrough came from me
 somewhat aggressively asking and telling her to get back to the real stuff. The moral of which I take away is that students don't
 particularly need to be babied. They know when they're writing well, and later they give you all this credit for crazy breakthroughs
 which they really worked through on their own.

It was exhausting, but the best class I had the whole semester. I'm getting ready to put together a syllabus for teaching jobs 
and it was extremely helpful to test out my thoughts in this "guerrilla seminar" where the number of students was not overwhelming
 and the atmosphere was accepting of excess and experiment. I made these huge reading packets week to week--it was hard to cut 
down--and as I got going for these bi-weekly meetings at which we might get to one or two paragraphs, I tracked which pieces I 
used to illustrate points or students liked and which got ignored. Much less of a shameful practice with four packets than with
30. Relax and listen carefully to your students.