YOU: A Course of Personal Writing -- My Reflection

After autumn term, the break flew by with various conferences and family obligations. I wanted to look back at my new course for ICU 2nd year students called YOU: A Course of Personal Writing.

Here's the link to the course blog.

http://you-personal-writing.blogspot.com/

It has the various course materials and links to student blog and writings.

This was a very fun course to teach, and I learned a lot. There's a saying that "the best way to learn something is to teach it" and this was very true, once again.

Basically, I allowed students free choice of topic, genre, and deadlines, and they just had to complete 20 blogs of free personal writing, and 3 published pieces that were drafted, revised, edited, and published on our blog.

The creativity of my students was very impressive. I also wrote a few pieces for practice, but since I have done very little creative writing since...high school, it was a very new and anxious process for me. I was very honest about that with my students, that I am not a professional creative writer in any way, and I was just one of the writers in the class trying to discover what is meaningful to me in terms of themes, and trying new genres.

How can the course be better? Students made excellent suggestions in their final reflections including adding a group project, introducing more examples of good writing, and ways to evaluate more transparently, and ways to help them squeeze out their creativity a little more efficiently with deadlines of some sort--so that not everything will be done at the last moment just before the end of the class.

I'm looking forward to teaching it next year!