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The OP Is Correct about the Word "Chartreuse"
i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver
https://www.tumblr.com/inkskinned/728362794212343808/when-i-wrote-this-2-years-ago-i-put-in-the-tags
This is a grim but still fantastic set of posts about writing, and also about teaching. This paragraph really hit home for me:
the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but...
This is exactly it. It's horrifying, but you can't talk about it openly, because then maybe you don't have a job anymore and you can't help anyone. On top of that, even at the Ivy League school where I currently teach, there are a lot of kids who are "cheating" or not turning in work or just plain disappearing or even harming themselves because they're so exhausted; and there are students who express incredible trauma in their written and creative work. The OP touches on this, so let me paraphrase from their tags:
Actually, this anxiety made me quit teaching. We forget teachers are people, and essentially we are making them withstand hugely traumatizing narratives without professional training or support. Like, I CANNOT help you. I wish I could. I literally spend so much time wishing I could. I get paid $15 an hour and I legit just do not have the resources. I want you to be safe, but I am also trying to be a person with severe anxiety.
I also want my students to be safe. And at the same time, I want to encourage them to step forward and take advantage of the incredible opportunity they're being given as people who have several years to do nothing but take classes and get funding for their projects. But, as an adjunct, I have no power and no resources, and it's hard to be brave when you're just one small person with severe anxiety. I'm doing my best, but I can't help but feel that it's not good enough. Because honestly, it isn't good enough. We all deserve so much better.
But anyway, concerning what the first post says about writing, I get the feeling that a lot of MFA programs are full of a very special flavor of exclusivity. If you take a group of people from the same age cohort and cultural background who all have the same financial ability to attend the same MFA program, of course you're going to see similarities in what they write. MFA programs therefore generate in-house standards about "creativity" and "originality" that no one who hasn't been through the program could ever be expected to understand, which is one of the many reasons why it's so difficult for the work of "outsiders" to make it out of the slush pile. I'm not throwing shade at the OP, whose posts are a critique of this mentality. I'm just saying that this is a thing, and it's frustrating.
https://www.tumblr.com/inkskinned/728362794212343808/when-i-wrote-this-2-years-ago-i-put-in-the-tags
This is a grim but still fantastic set of posts about writing, and also about teaching. This paragraph really hit home for me:
the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but...
This is exactly it. It's horrifying, but you can't talk about it openly, because then maybe you don't have a job anymore and you can't help anyone. On top of that, even at the Ivy League school where I currently teach, there are a lot of kids who are "cheating" or not turning in work or just plain disappearing or even harming themselves because they're so exhausted; and there are students who express incredible trauma in their written and creative work. The OP touches on this, so let me paraphrase from their tags:
Actually, this anxiety made me quit teaching. We forget teachers are people, and essentially we are making them withstand hugely traumatizing narratives without professional training or support. Like, I CANNOT help you. I wish I could. I literally spend so much time wishing I could. I get paid $15 an hour and I legit just do not have the resources. I want you to be safe, but I am also trying to be a person with severe anxiety.
I also want my students to be safe. And at the same time, I want to encourage them to step forward and take advantage of the incredible opportunity they're being given as people who have several years to do nothing but take classes and get funding for their projects. But, as an adjunct, I have no power and no resources, and it's hard to be brave when you're just one small person with severe anxiety. I'm doing my best, but I can't help but feel that it's not good enough. Because honestly, it isn't good enough. We all deserve so much better.
But anyway, concerning what the first post says about writing, I get the feeling that a lot of MFA programs are full of a very special flavor of exclusivity. If you take a group of people from the same age cohort and cultural background who all have the same financial ability to attend the same MFA program, of course you're going to see similarities in what they write. MFA programs therefore generate in-house standards about "creativity" and "originality" that no one who hasn't been through the program could ever be expected to understand, which is one of the many reasons why it's so difficult for the work of "outsiders" to make it out of the slush pile. I'm not throwing shade at the OP, whose posts are a critique of this mentality. I'm just saying that this is a thing, and it's frustrating.