An Explorative High School Writing Course

Introduction and My Motivation

When I was trying to figure out what topic to pick for this assignment, I thought about taking a specific problem in education and trying to solve it. I thought about ways to make online learning more engaging and I thought about how to keep women and minorities in math and computer science. I thought about connecting students to older generations and ways that physical movement could be incorporated into classrooms. All of these topics are important to me, and I’ve thought about each a substantial amount. But then I decided to approach this assignment a different way.

This project has so much freedom, and I’m going to take as much advantage of that as possible. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a teacher (I don’t even know what I’ll be doing in the months to come), because I’m not a particularly great public speaker. My voice shakes when I talk to classmates that I’ve known for months, I get dizzy giving presentations to fifth graders, and I get nauseous every time I have to attend classes where professors call on students at random, or worse, use names written on popsicle sticks that they pull out of cups. I even try to deflect attention away from myself at dinner conversations. The point is, I don’t know if I could stand in front of strangers and present for hours, but I love education. So for this assignment I decided to design a class that I would love and be capable of teaching (despite my lack of knowledge in the topic) and that I would have loved to take in highschool.

            For both my imaginary teaching self and my imaginary highschool self, I’m designing a thriller writing course. For my imaginary teaching self I’m making lectures minimal, and the ones that exist will be optional and pre-recorded to be watched by students in their homes. My imaginary teaching self is also being given opportunities to get to know her students’ interests, and to foster an environment of self-reflection, so that her students will no longer be strangers.

            For my imaginary highschool self I’m designing the course to be as low-stakes as possible, so that she can explore any interests she wants and so that she can focus on the joy of the process over the quality of the content. I’m also going to be filling in some of the holes in my education that I wish had been addressed before I left for college: how to ask for help, how to self-motivate, how to listen to the other side’s viewpoint, and how to critically analyze social constructs.

My Inspiration

            Now that you know my motivation, I should also explain my inspiration. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I wrote stories all the time. I wrote about frozen ice skating rinks hidden behind bedroom walls, ghosts that were trapped in diamond jail cells, and giant zombies that could be deflated by removing the plugs on their feet. And like a lot of students, I stopped writing. School had taught me to analyze my work from an imaginary audience’s perspective, and imaginary eyes started judging everything I did. My writing started fading away because I could no longer enjoy imperfect stories. The catch-22 is that the only way to get close to perfection is to write thousands of pages of garbage. The writing class I’m designing is not intended for students to strive for perfection. It’s really a class meant to teach students how to pick up their swords and fight off the imagined judgemental audience hovering over their shoulders. This class is to teach students how to write their way through thousands of pages of garbage.

            The fact that I stopped writing complicates my ability to create a curriculum for a class. Luckily, I found the inspiration to start watching some online classes a few months ago on how to write. I may not know all the tips and tricks that go into creative writing courses, but I’ve learned a lot about the process of writing through these videos, and for the purposes of my imaginary writing class, the process is far more important than the content. I’ll be basing this course off of what I learned from Dan Brown’s Masterclass, and some inspiration will come from David Sedaris’ Masterclass. The class is intended to be a yearlong course, and I’ve divided it into six sections: (1) Pick a Topic, (2) Research, (3) Read, (4) Philosophize, (5) Write, and (6) Bind.

Step 1: Pick a Topic

            I think that a lot of us who want to write but don’t are waiting for inspiration to plop into our lives before we pick up our pens to begin. If there’s one thing that Dan Brown taught me, it’s that you can wait many lifetimes for that moment. Inspiration needs a nudge, and so the first section of my course is dedicated to chasing inspiration, rather than waiting for it.

            Students will be asked to think of anything they’re currently passionate about or something they want to know more about, because they’re about to become experts on that topic. It should be specific enough to not be called generic. If they pick something too broad to research efficiently, they’ll be asked to find a subtopic within that area that interests them. For example, if a student chooses baseball, the amount of research involved in studying baseball would be too overwhelming. The student would be encouraged to find a subset of baseball that they find interesting, like the use of steroids in baseball, women’s baseball, bets in baseball, etc. The topics are endless. Students could explore underwater archaeology, food science, computer hacking, the cold war, or a myriad of other subjects.

            The primary purpose of this section is to stir up inspiration and to find a world that they’ll be able to place their characters in. But this section also has several other purposes. It gives the teacher an opportunity to see their students’ interests, and it gives students the opportunity to share their interests with each other and with the teacher.

Step 2: Research

            This section has two parts. The first is general research. Students will take trips to the library, they’ll Google, and they’ll read news articles. They’ll keep files of fun facts about their topic. They’ll be told that in addition to general research, they’re searching for some kind of tension in their field, some place filled with moral ambiguity. A good place to start may be by looking up “[topic name] legal cases.” Finding moral grey zones might give them ideas for story plots, but it will also force them to look at two different perspectives, encouraging them to sympathize and hopefully recognize that contradictory points of view can both be right in a sense, and that contradictory points of view can sometimes be rooted in similar motivations.

            The second part of the research step is “asking an expert.” Once students have gathered a lot of information about their topic, they’ll have to call or email multiple experts with contradictory points of view. This is similar to Paulo Friere’s idea of presenting students with two videos of opposing opinions and having them debate the arguments. For this assignment students are being asked to find their own videos, and to already be knowledgeable about the topic. But similar to Friere, students would play both videos for the class, if they manage to get two responses, and the class will debate the arguments. This will give the student the opportunity to hear an even greater number of arguments coming directly from their classmates that they might later use in a story.

The point of this step is also to teach students how to ask for help. Students shouldn’t be expected to know everything, and in this way they’ll develop the understanding that experts want to share their expertise and that working with others to understand a topic is more constructive than working alone. They might also learn how to ask critical questions and how to engage with people of differing opinions. This is a skill I wish I had learned earlier.

An experience this year taught me the importance of at least understanding both sides of an argument: I was running a participant in the lab I work for, and my participant was very talkative. Right from the start, when he began talking about climate change, I knew we had very differing opinions. I didn’t start really engaging in the conversation until he started talking about abortion. I’ve always been on the pro-choice side of the abortion issue, and my participant was pro-life. And not just pro-life in a passive way. My participant was a very active member at abortion clinic protests, and he had a lot of statistics to throw my way. The conversation was fascinating. I learned that we both have the goal of protecting the woman, but we had very different views on how to make that happen. Our conversation didn’t change my stance on the issue, but it did give me an important look into another perspective, and it was a very humanizing experience.

Step 3: Read

Maybe this goes without saying, but there will be some reading in this course. Students will be asked to write notes in the margins of the book while they’re reading. They’ll be asked to note moments that they made them feel emotional, and why it made them feel emotional. They’ll be asked to note moments of suspense or curiosity, and what the author did to cause that. Often students are asked to identify the meaning in books. In this course there will be less of a focus on that, and more of a focus on how the author makes readers feel certain ways. This is more useful for writing a thriller, and it keeps a focus on how students feel rather than on what the author intended.

Reading can provide inspiration for other stories, and it also provides a framework for what stories look like, and having an example to jump off of can make writing less intimidating. Mimicking the writers that students have read won’t be looked down upon in this class. Reading thrillers might also inspire some students who generally don’t read school books to develop a love for books.

Step 4: Philosophize

            Stories are revealing of the author’s biases and opinions, even if they aren’t explicit. The characters that authors choose to be their heroes and their villains is an interesting minefield of who they consider to be “good” and who they consider to be “bad.” Step 4 is meant to help students consciously acknowledge their own biases. They’ll start off by being asked questions such as “Who are your heroes?” and progress to questions to “What is a hero?”, “What is a villain?”, “Who are some of your favorite heroes and villains?”, and “Why are they your favorites?”. They’ll also be asked some other fundamental questions in the field of philosophy of heroism, such as “What motivates people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes?” and “In our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort?”.

            These questions will lead to questions about the importance of diverse heroes in literature and media, and how the portrayal of particular races as “villains” in literature and media can be harmful. I’d also like there to be discussions about what type of characters are considered main characters versus side characters, and the current harmful issue of disabled characters primarily being cast and written as side characters. I hope that by grappling with these types of questions both in small groups and as a class, students will learn to critically analyze social constructs.

Step 5: Write

            One of the most important steps: write! I suspect that even with talks about fighting our inner critics and even having amassed pages of inspiration, this step will be difficult. Facing a blank page is still facing a blank page. This class will include five aspects that will try to alleviate the difficulty of writing: (1) in-class writing time, (2) flipped-classroom lectures, (3) brainstorming groups, (4) journals, and (5) talks about self-motivation.

            First, students will have time to write in class. They will also be allowed to write outside of class, but that will not be an expectation. I believe this to be an important aspect of the class because not everyone has a home life that is conducive to writing. Also, being surrounded by students who are also writing might be motivating.

            Second, there will be pre-recorded online lectures for students to watch at home if they want. The lectures will be about the specifics of writing: how to write a prologue, how to get through the middle sections of a book, how to create suspense, how to write endings, and a myriad of other lessons. This might be helpful for students who feel stuck and want more of a recipe for how to write a story.

            Third, students will be given a short period of time at the beginning of every class to socialize with their brainstorming groups. These groups will exist in case a student is experiencing writer’s block and wants help from friends. If nobody wants or needs help, it’s an opportunity for students to get to know their classmates, which I consider to be a crucial part of the class. Feeling as though a few students have your back can make all the difference in a classroom.

            Fourth, students will keep journals to reflect on their writing process once a week. They’ll write about their frustrations, successes, and roadblocks, which the teacher can then read to see where they can help out in a one-on-one setting. This part of the class is meant to keep the students focused on the process over the content.

            Lastly, there will be talks on motivation. Students will discuss what motivates them, and read about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (a topic that’s important in highschool and beyond). They’ll also be encouraged to write, whether or not the “inspiration strikes.” Sometimes inspiration is found in the process.

Step 6: Binding

            The last step of the class is to have each student bind their book, or to have all the stories put into a single book. This last step is purely celebratory. Often it feels as though final projects and papers are paper shredded into grades. This step may feel counterintuitive, since the focus of this class isn’t on the content, but I believe the book binding to be a celebration of the process. Stories won’t be ranked by quality, but rather celebrated for their existence. The books can be kept either in the classroom or in the library for future classes to read, or the students can take them home. This choice of sharing the book with the public or not is important, because forcing students to share their work could get in the way of their love for the process.

Concluding Thoughts

Thank you for following me on my journey of designing a class for teachers who are afraid of public speaking and for students who want to rid themselves of their inner critics. If you’re a non-writer who wants to write and you enjoyed this, I hope that even without a course you might still attempt the battle of writing through the fear of failure. Doing so would make you a hero in my book. If you’re a teacher who enjoyed this, I hope you’ll consider giving students the creative space to love the process. Students don’t remember most of the content from highschool; they remember the process of making the content, and they remember if they enjoyed it. And lastly, if you didn’t enjoy this, I hope you give me nine hundred and ninety nine more chances. Good writing takes a thousand pages of garbage, and I’ve put on my armor to write my way through all of them.