Regular hand-in's vs. That one BIG deadline

Something I am always being asked is how the weekly assignments compare to those in the UK - here's a hint.  They're assessed out here.

Picture via The Wild WE

At Bath Spa University you will be asked to hand work in each work, or every other week depending on your class timetable, which is workshopped as a group.  If you're not handing in work then you might get a raised eyebrow, a stern look and a reprimand but you won't fail the course. At different stages in the year you will have larger hand-in's that do count toward the course, they are at least 1,000 words and could be an essay or original 'creative writing', that is graded. Obviously the classes differ in the finer details but the common denominator here is that you are expected to turn in work each week there are few consequences if you don't.


On the flip-side Columbia College weekly hand-in's do count toward your grade and so if you are in the habit of not doing the work or submitting it late this can really damage the grade you walk away with. It also backs up the strict attendance rules because if you are not in class to hand in work it'll be a late hand-in and an absence.  


But why is one going to be better than the other?  Well speaking as a student I love that I can miss a class and still make up the work without it damaging my marks.  Only a crazy person misses the final deadline so you can rest assured that as long as you turn in good work then, you should be okay.  The down side with this is that as someone who struggles a little (read as a lot) with self-motivation and so once again the attendance issue rears it's ugly head.  Is it too tempting to skip classes knowing that as long as you turn in a super essay it won't be such a problem. By having deadlines each week it assures that people who may have hidden behind the submissions of harder working (maybe more confident would be better?) cannot.  Each person has to submit each week and it means they are constantly working to the ideas taught in the class that week.  It also means that whoever is leading the class get's to see how people are improving on a week by week basis but can also spot bad habits before they get too ingrained.  The downside here would be the sheer amount of work the class leader is then doing each week, especially for longer pieces of work.  That said - whoever marks the 1000-2,500 (sometimes as much as 5000 for third years) suddenly has a huge workload in a smaller space of time.


Whether you are a student or a teacher I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on this, as I am un-decided, so please please please leave a comment!

I have always been a very visual person.  Growing up I would write and illustrate my own stories about Silly Lily the Mermaid and Rose (who was a rose).  These stories would be written and drawn out in old exercise books, the excess pages torn out, and then handed to my Mother who was always suitably impressed. I read an interview recently where an artist claimed to be self publishing at the age of 11 because she found a Zine she had made in her attack years later.  If we go by these rules I have been self publishing for well over a decade now, but I think it's codswallop so we'll move on.

You should know by now that I am taking a drawing class alongside my writing ones. It is the introductory drawing class at Columbia College and leads onto more advanced classes each semester.  I was really hoping to sit in on a life drawing class during my time here but as I will be leaving after my first semester it's not feasible. Visually art and illustration are food for the soul but one of the brilliant things that writing does that image cannot is get across sound and smell.  Visually art engages us but writing reaches out with the ghost of our other senses too and so together they're like a dream come true, for me anyway.

So why am I taking a drawing class really?  The answer to that is quite simply, comics.  I love comics.  I read comics.  I study the way they are written, the way they are drawn, script out my and constantly urge my illustrator-type pals to draw them out for me.  But I kind of, well completely, want to write and illustrate my own.  Some people would be happy to focus on the writing alone but I guess I just wont be happy until I've given this a good solid go.  And that means attending my Drawing 1 classes.

The first piece of work I was happy with in class.

Heres an idea: All writers should take an art class regardless of whether they want to make comics.

You might think that this is wildly unnecessary but I think it's something that could catch on.  You see, I've been noticing that the more I draw and the more aware I am of how my work responds and works with images the more I have been focusing on details.  Some people might be lucky enough to have a highly detailed writing style anyway but I have a tendency to get carried away by plot and dialogue.  By paying attention to not only my own drawing but by the work of others I am finding myself drawn to the textures of things, how they might feel in my hand or where they are place on the page.

But it isn't just seeing the story on a visual level. When I draw I get into a specific frame of mind, I find it much easier to ignore other people and focus on the tiny details that I might have otherwise missed. If you can find a familiar state of mind when writing you should be able to avoid distractions that can break your train of thought.

I would have loved to take some more classes that combine word and image, Columbia has an exciting selection taught by the likes of Audrey Niffenegger and Patty McNair. Let's just hope I get to continue my 'artistic journey' when I return to Bath Spa.

P.S You can see some of my scribblings here...boom.

Reading Assignments

Photo source: Portugalthegirl

If I had to give somebody one piece of advice about coming to study at Columbia College, it would be 'beware of the reading assignments' because there are a lot of them. And guess what - you kind of have to do them!


This is not to say that we do not get reading assignments at Bath Spa.  I was explaining just the other day that if you take Prose, Writing For Young People or Sudden Prose (to name a few) you will be expected to have read for each of the classes. Often times these will be whole novels that you are expected to read each week and so if you have more than one class with these requirements you can be tempted to bluff your way out of these situations.  I remember once in first year a friend of mine had not read the assigned book, not naming anyone Tom, but managed to talk at length about 'what he had taken from the text' and at one point managed to correct the lecturer on a mistake she'd made when referencing the one page he had glanced that.  As someone who genuinely had taken a lot from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles it was all a little baffling. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Something that I really enjoyed at Bath Spa were the discussions we would then have about the work, especially in my Writing For Young People class, when we got to discuss whether aspects of the book were appropriate for the audience, stylistic devices, why some people loved the work and why some people detested it.


In my Fiction 1 class we read the opening two movements of Richard Wright's Native Son, 50 pages at a time.  We did not always discuss what we had read but we are able to describe moments that caught our attention during re-call.  I could not tell you if everybody had actually done the assigned reading, or even why we were not expected to finish the entire novel, but reading it a small amount at a time did make it a lot easier. It also means we had a much more drawn out discussion period if we wanted to talk about the text as we had weeks and weeks instead one one. Something else I also really enjoy from this class is that as well as the long running reading assignments, Native Son and Writing From Start To Finish, we are also set at least two short stories to read each week.  This has the effect of breaking up the text and making it a lot less daunting.


Something both Bath Spa and Columbia have in common is the 'pop quiz'.  These are always often enough to ensure you have at least thought of doing the reading and sporadic enough that you never quite know when the next one is coming.  One class that did buck this trend however was Sudden Prose at Bath Spa.  The reading was required each week and (but I might be wrong here) I think there were reading quizzes every week.  One was definitely a written response, our own flash fiction inspired by one we'd read, but the others would ask a question and you were able to discuss a couple of flash fictions that had stuck most in your mind.  Unlike the other classes these were also counting toward our final grade rather than just ensuring we were keeping up with our out-of-class reading. As a student this did mean I was more aware of whether I had read or not and was also an easy way of spreading out the graded work through the academic year.


A lot of students complain that the amount of assigned reading they have to do for their classes and that because of the length of their classes they only ever have a superficial conversation. But there does have to come a point, especially as writing students that we have to stop expecting our class discussions to tell us what insight we've gleaned from the reading.  We should be reading everything we can, all of the time, without expecting to be spoon fed afterwards.


What's the old saying?  You can't teach talent?  Well it's true but you also can't teach 'how to read your assignments'.  You've just go to do it.

The Story Workshop Method

This weekend I was asked to write a short article about studying in the US for the National Association of Writers in Education's magazine Writing in Education. As the email said 'there is no pay and the deadline is yesterday' but it was an opportunity I couldn't refuse.

I couldn't resist posing with the book we use each week!

John Shulz was a professor at Columbia College and while he was here he explored different teaching methods until he settled on the Story Workshop Method that is still used 50 years later. His book Writing From Start To Finish is full of interesting chapters on model tellings, letter writing, journal entries etc.  You might recognise some of the topics mentioned from my earlier posts. Each chapter has a range of examples from Kafka to students writing in their journals. The chapters in the book perfectly compliment a lot of the methods we use in class: recall, word games, the reading of student and published work.

Aside from being taught in a fresh new way I am a firm advocate for Columbia's three strike policy. I have missed a couple of classes since arriving due to illness (funnily enough I keep catching colds in this freezing cold city!) but it is still a lot better.  I really hope it is something that Bath Spa University look to introduce in the future.  If attendance is poor there's nothing like the threat of automatic failure to get the lecture hall packed again.

Maybe I'll be able to share the article with you soon, till then keep studying!