Today was the last day I have to worry about classes for this semester. I took my final for Spanish, and yesterday I turned in the last story for English. I haven't said much about either class, partly because I've been too busy to write anything, partly because I didn't want to say anything that could affect my grade. I have nothing to say about Spanish that could affect my grade, the teacher was very good. She grew up in Spain and majored in foreign languages in college, and she loves teaching. She is very devoted to her work, spends a lot of time with the students that need help, even if they don't deserve it.

English is another matter however. I don't know why I expected anything different, but I did. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but in retrospect the odds are against things turning out in any other way than they did.

See, if I would have really, really thought about it before I started the class, I could have predicted everything that went on in the class. The class was short story writing, but it's just a title they used to get away from the 'creative writing' title that people avoid like the plague. What kind of people take a creative writing class, other than those that need the credit? And what kind of person would be teaching such a class? The average person should be able to figure these things out without ever stepping into the class. I'm not average though, so I was optimistic about the whole thing when I started.

The class turned out to be nothing more than a lot of 'work shops', where we are supposed to learn how to give constructive criticism. At least one would assume that to be the case, but in reality it is much different. There were various types in this class, that is to say, reasons for taking the class. There were those that aspired to be the next Hemingway or Stephen King, those that actually thought they could write well, and those needing the credit. Most of the students were people that thought they could write well, and also wanted to be doing it for a living in a big way. I can't tell you how many times the phrase came up in class informing us that an excerpt was 'something from a novel I'm working on'. Like I said, I should have expected it, but I didn't. Put these together with your average creative writing teacher, the aspiring writer that made it out of college, and you've got a nice picture of the endurance test I went through.

Like I said, there were a lot of 'work shops', so much so that more than half the semester was spent going through that ordeal. It turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of people looking to stroke each other. Not only that, but we had to respond in writing to every story. It is difficult enough to respond to an ok story that really doesn't appeal to you, but to have to respond to bad stories, and try to find something nice to say about them, is torture.

Still, I got through it ok I guess. A few instances will give a good indication of how things really went. First of all, we had to hear several times about how this one particular character in a novel the instructor was working on just couldn't stay in character. Here's how it went.

"The character started out to be a boy, was supposed to be a boy, but as the story wore on he wanted to be a girl. Through the whole story the character was telling me, 'I'm a girl'. I kept saying, 'you're a boy'. The character insisted, 'I'm a girl'. Eventually I gave in and told the character, 'Ok, you're a girl'."

I am not lying. I heard it several times. That isn't the worst though. The last class we had to read something in front of the class that we had written during the semester. We all went through it, luckily being limited to two minutes so as not to last very long. I thought it was all over, until the teacher got in front of us. Then HE had to read something HE had written. I just couldn't fuckin believe it. We had to listen to two of his poems PLUS a creative writing essay.