by Lavanya Ramakrishnan, 2019 Summer Fellow
It was not a typical
Wednesday morning at NDSU. With the school year behind, most classrooms were
empty and most buildings showed no sign of people inside during the day.
However, one could find a bunch of enthusiastic public school students sporting
bright green Red River Valley Writing Project t-shirts listening to a
professor’s lecture with rapt attention in Morrill 109. The walls of the room
displayed color and imagination, evidently those of the sassy students. The
thirteen students were part of a teen writing workshop organized by Jamee
Larson, a creative writing instructor at NDSU and Teacher Consultant for the Red
River Valley Writing Project (RRVWP).
The students were being
taught the importance of tone and descriptions in a personal narrative. Just as
the professor Dr. Karl Bakkum from NDSCS finished explaining the concepts, the
students began coming up with their own list of adjectives and descriptive
words. The words ranged from strong to blunt to whimsical to cheerful.
On interacting with the
students who come from different schools in the Fargo-Moorhead area, one can
further comprehend their passion for writing in various genres. Emily Gietzen,
a seventh-grader, enthused about the new genres she discovered after starting
to attend the workshop. Allie Skauge, another seventh-grader, said every one of
her peers was here out of interest. This workshop had students come out of
their comfort zones by having them try out writing in different genres.
Ms. Larson said this
teen workshop birthed out of a conversation with Dr. Kelly Sassi, Director of
the RRVWP, and a professor in the same department. Larson was pleased that the
teens kept up their enthusiasm all day from 9 am - 4pm on all four days the
workshop ran. She said her biggest goal was to encourage their writing
interest.
Looks like her goal was
achieved, as on the last day of the workshop, there was a semi-public showcase in
Morrill 110 that saw students reciting their poems and reading out excerpts
from their fiction, monologues and scripts with great poise. Their parents and
friends also got to see the walls in the lobby decorated with colorful graphic
stories and poetry with the proud authors’ signatures.
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