Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom

There was one kid who always sat in the front row–let’s call him Fester–who recognized me right from the start of class because he’d read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. —Mike ArnzenGrossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name… “Fester”. His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word “climax.” She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her — not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don’t teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall’s American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom’s Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn’t bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I’d have let him redo the presentation if he’d have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing — academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don’t want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it’s a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student’s grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It’s part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I’ve had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

11 thoughts on “Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom

  1. For the record, I would like to point out that this atrocious website was never publicly available – it was only shown once, in a class of maybe 8 upper level classmen.

    I think I’ve it out – in your this description of what happened, what you write comes across as “One student…one of my children…*pause*…porn site”.

    Yikes! What an association!

    I seem to remember it being a little strange in class, but I don’t remember the incident being *really shocking*. It was more like “To demonstrate poor linking on a web page, a student took innocent pictures of children (well, the Dr. Jerz’s children for extra effect) and linked them to naughty sounding urls to really drive home the point that users don’t like it when something that looks like it links to one thing links to something completely different.”

  2. Oh I know Dr. Jerz. I realized this..I just knew that one part referred to me. no biggie. now lets just hope I’m back in the fall..

  3. My personal favorite creative writing assignment in our journalism class last year stemmed from nursery rhymes. I recall writing about Little Red Riding Hood in inverted-pyramid form :-)

  4. Excellent reflection on some pretty transgressive experiences. Obviously, they crossed the line. If Fester (in my article) had published his story featuring “Mr. Arnzen” (as unlikely as that is), I’d probably sue him for slander.

    Even so, the website parody which used your kids’ photos sounds quite clever to me, and a good indictment of “bad internet sites.” Though it won’t lessen the sting, I suspect you’d be even more horrified if they chose to use a randomly selected photograph of a child (because it would open the school up to some pretty serious legal issues if the person who owned the photo found out). Naturally, the students should have used their own baby photos or something, but it was probably easier to find yours. Part of the problem here is the openness of online material to outsiders.

    Beyond these issues, the matter for me seems to be a question of what motivates students to push the teacher’s boundaries in the first place, and how to turn these into “teachable moments.” You mention youthful rebellion, and I agree, but I think it’s also more complicated than that. As a writing issue, these matters often turn on the students’ conception of (or lack of a conception of) audience and thus it’s all quite pertinent to what we’re trying to teach. Your entry helps me think about this issue even more deeply — thanks!

  5. Mike — you’re right. Part of the subject matter of that course was the openness of the internet, and how the de-centering of power is potentially threatening to those who are in power.

    What’s even more creepy… within a few hours of my having posted anecdotes about students without mentioning their names, it seems that two of those unnamed students have posted comments on my blog. Of course, I have an idea who reads my blog, and that awareness of audience influences my content and phrasing.

  6. The student in question did demonstrate one of the links in class, so I
    know that URL worked! I think the page that came up was more of a list
    of links than a stash of photos, but the content of the page was
    obvious enough that it got a strong reaction from the other students.
    And yes, the page in question certainly did feature terrible design,
    expertly finessed to annoy the hell out of users. As I recall, I don’t
    think a random person who happened across the site would have known who
    the photos were supposed to be, so all the student was doing was
    tweaking me to see my reaction in the confines of the classroom when he
    was presenting the ugly page.
    A student once created an animated GIF of Rainbow Hector
    bursting into flames, and his little charred skeleton collapsing into a
    pile. He showed it as part of his final presentation, and though I
    asked him for a copy of the graphic, I never got it. Too bad.

    Putting up silly blog entries that poke fun at me is one
    thing, but bringing in my family is another matter. I was never mad at
    this student, but watching movies or hearing news stories that feature
    children in danger affects me emotionally in a way that is much more
    intense than it was before I had children.
    Let’s say we’re all walking through a parking lot, and I’m
    carrying my daugher in such a way that she’s blocking my view of my
    son, and I turn around to look for my son just as he passes behind me,
    so that my daughter is still blocking my view as I’m turning, and I
    hear a car coming and I don’t know where my son is, and he’s drinking a
    juice box so that he can’t immediately answer my shout until he’s
    swallowed.
    That split-second of terror is deeply ingrained, and it
    changes the way you look at the world. I do actually lie awake at
    night, worrying what I would do if, I don’t know, a bear broke into the
    house, and I had to distract it in order to give my wife time to scoop
    up the kids and jump out a window.
    And I’m the optimist in the family.
    Regarding writing… while I usually preach that shorter
    sentences are better, at times an author wants to break that rule for
    the sake of creating emotional impact. I didn’t think too much about
    that sentence as I was witing it, but you’re right, I stretched it out
    a bit,

  7. Oh, from the english point of view, it’s quite amusing how that sentence, while somewhat innacurate, was designed for maximum impact itself. :-)

    Your sentence:
    One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site.

    A completely accurate sentence:
    A student posted photos of my children which linked to porn sites.

    I mean, they’re both pretty bad – but by saying “a photo” and “one of my children” rather than just “photos”, and saying “a link that connected” rather than “linked”, you really draw out the impact, wouldn’t you say?

  8. “As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep.”

    Well, it did practically make you weep, didn’t it? :-)

    Actually, I believe this incident gets worse each time the story is brought up. People seem to do that – a story, over time, loses all it’s details untils only the very most important parts are retold. For example, that site *also* had horrid design – the page was covered in frames, and was visual chaos. Plus, the fact that those pictures were linked to something that was the complete opposite was also a show of bad design. Like if you click on the “shopping cart” link, and it brings you to a search engine – poor design.

    At the time, you seemed to find the pictures and links as amusing as it was “shocking”. I don’t think most of the links to the sites even worked, they were just risky sounding url’s (I know one or two worked, but I don’t think they led to anything that was really to bad either.)

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