Teach Creative Writing With a Bit of Humor
Guest Post by:
R.E. Myers, Ed.D.
About This Blog Entry's Guest Author
R. E. Myers, Ed.D, began his career in education as an elementary teacher in Santa Cruz County, CA. While pursuing his doctorate, he become a graduate student of the late Dr. E. Paul Torrance. That association led to a variety of experiences in the field of creative thinking. His newest book, Motivational Writing Lessons: Clever, Humorous, and Altogether Creative Lessons, is available from Prufrock Press.
There are still teachers who require students to write about their summer experiences at the start of the school year, and I suppose there are many of us who have written accounts of six or seven summers during our own school years. A number of us have also been forced to write, as everyone in our classes was required to do, a composition entitled "My Favorite Hobby" or "The Person I Admire Most." These aren't necessarily bad writing assignments when they are presented in a stimulating way and when students "get into" the subjects. On the other hand, they can be dreadful when they are introduced in a sterile and peremptory manner and when the students know that the assignment is just one more in a long series of such writing chores.
It is far better to inject some humor and excitement into your writing program by doing something a little offbeat. For example, you can put your students into hypothetical situations that evoke realistic, whimsical, or fantastic reactions from them. Below is one that focuses on sense experiences.
What would you suppose might be going on if you:
. . . walked on hot sand that burned your bare feet and felt perspiration running down your neck and looked out to the sea and saw a gigantic wave and realized your mouth was very dry?
. . . turned a corner and felt a stiff breeze that smelled strongly of garlic and heard a distant rumbling and saw hundreds of crows in the sky?
. . . climbed a hill by taking a rocky path that hurt your feet, picked up a leaf that got your hand greasy, and heard a lot of laughing and then saw a bunch of newspapers scattered everywhere?
. . . looked out of a window and saw lots and lots of ants and heard metal being scraped and smelled something burning nearby and then felt the building shaking?
By combining either logical or unusual sense experiences, you can create hypothetical situations that will stretch your students' minds—and that should be fun for them and for you.