RowanSherwoodHawkenProjects2022

 As I stated at the start, I was inspired to do this project because of the great experience I had taking this class. I think the overall process went quite well: the addition of TAs allowed the class to cover a really broad range of topics that wouldn't have been possible with just two teachers. I also felt like I gained a lot of personal growth at teaching. With Zack and Rennie's help, I learned a lot of good skills for engaging with people more. I often have difficulties communicating things legibly and not rambling, so this is a very important skill for me to learn in general! I think areas the project could have been improved were our workshops. I think it would have been more beneficial for all the TAs if we had planned some of them much before the actual intensive, so that they would have felt more complete and ready to go. They were still good experiences, but they definitely did not feel as polished as the teachers' workshops. Another difference I would make is the...

 For this last week, most students are spending time working on their final projects, so aside from the fiction workshop the TAs and I didn't have too many responsibilities. However, the students did wrap up their reading of The Fifth Season , and we led a class wide discussion on the book overall. Many people seemed to have neutral to negative opinions of the book, with only a few positives. Through discussion, we were able to key everyone in to the themes and techniques they should take away from. Although this is a very valuable text to read, we decided that it is probably a little to complex for a class like this to read, especially considering there are freshmen in the class. One other responsibility we had was going out to buy art supplies for the students' final projects. Although this was pretty easy compared to our other tasks, it was still a nice exercise in figuring out what each student needs to be set with their projects, and then finding all of those supplies. We ...

Our fiction workshop went quite well! Olivia showed a clip from The Devil Wears Prada to show how to create an impression of a character based on the way people act around them, and then talked about plot maps a little bit. Abby then gave her lecture on creating round characters, which involves having a backstory, a starting event, an end goal, and actions taken to reach that goal. Finally, I used an exercise that I learned from Mr Harris's Art of Fiction class. I started by having the students write a short scene out of entirely dialogue, as in only the spoken words and nothing else. Then, I had the students go back and add in the descriptive language (they said, they tilted their head, etc). The purpose of this exercise is to show how dialogue itself should be the backbone of the scene, and the descriptive language used should elevate the dialogue rather than being the foundation. I also stressed the importance of having some sort of dynamic change over the conversation, such as ...

 During this second week, while the students had work time for their final projects, I worked with the other TAs to get a lot of grading done. The main thing that we were grading were the artifacts, an exercise that the students completed at the end of every day. They would receive ten minutes to create some sort of small poem, drawing, or short paragraph that gave a snapshot of one small part of their world. Like everything in the class, these were just graded on complete/incomplete, but we made sure to provide feedback on each artifact. One problem we ran into was that many students were only writing a sentence or two, and we agreed with Zach and Rennie that this wasn't enough for a proper artifact. When students submitted artifacts like these, we would offer comments on how to expand the idea further, such as what aspects seemed most interesting. For the artifacts that were substantial, we would instead provoke further thinking for what else the student could develop from their ...

During the second week, we had a few more field trips, including one to the natural history museum. During this trip, me and Abby (one of the other TAs) patrolled around the museum together and asked the students about what they were looking at. The goal of this trip was for them to create some sort of historical progression from their world, such as describing an evolutionary sequence of extinct creatures. A lot of the students took interest in the visually impressive exhibits, such as the crystals, and Abby and I were having a little trouble thinking of what discussion to prompt from these. We eventually settled on asking these students what the cultural significance of different crystals might be in their own world, such as which ones are used for wealth or for jewelry. We also took time ourselves to explore the animal section in the outside part of the museum with Zach and Rennie. We discussed different ideas for the final section of the class, such as watching something. We eventu...

Aside from my workshop, the general responsibilities I had this week were grading, chaperoning field trips, and leading discussions on The Fifth Season, which the students are reading for this class. So far, we have gone to field trips at the art museum, the zoo, and the botanical gardens. During these field trips, the other TAs and I were asked by Rennie and Zack to ask the students questions and push their thought process into taking away ideas for their own worlds. For instance, at the zoo, I asked many students to think about the characteristics they saw on different animals and how those characteristics related to the environments that those animals were living in. The students worked on an assignment this week that involved creating a world map that includes climate and biomes, so I then told them to try and think in reverse after seeing these animals: instead of thinking why the animals are like this, imagine just the biome itself and using the knowledge gained from the zoo, pic...

 I ran my first workshop on Tuesday, 5/17. It was an extension from my World Religions honors project on religion and gender that I adapted to a worldbuilding context. One of the main topics that I explored for my honors project was how religions change over time, so I figured it would be interesting to apply this to a fictional religion.  For my workshop, I gave a presentation about two of the main topics I had researched for my project, which were gender in Judaism and the conflict over gender identity between the native people of Indonesia and the Islamic government there. Since both of these examples demonstrate how religion grapples with modern concepts, I then asked the students how religion had changed in their lives. Although the discussion was initially very limited, Zach suggested that I have the students talk to each other and then share out, which was more more effective, and a good lesson I learned on teaching. The previous day, Rennie had the students create thei...

I decided to be a teaching assistant for the Worldbuilding intensive because of how impactful this class was for me when I took it as a sophomore. Before taking the class, I was a really big fan of fantasy stories, but I never saw them as something I could create myself. Taking the class introduced me to the possibility of creating them by thoroughly demonstrating how some of the best authors all begin to create the worlds they use for their stories. For my final creative project, I wrote a set of short stories, which was my first foray into creative writing. Presently, writing is one of my biggest passions and I want to be a writer for a career, so I attribute this class to my discovery of this. Since this class was so important to me, my goal is to help make the class even more engaging and broad by bringing in my own interests and helping teach the students about them, so that more people might discover how fun it is to create fiction from this class. To help with this goal, I would...