Creative Writing for the Rhetoric Stage I & II

"Each of the creative writing prompts and the process I went through when writing them was incredibly, incredibly helpful to me as a novice writer." - Student Course Evaluation

"Mr. Bauer has been an amazing teacher to work with. He gives solid feedback, he’s easy to access, he comes across as likable while still being productive in class. It was a pleasure to have him as my teacher." - Student Course Evaluation

Because my student participated in the delayed class, I chose engagement in assignments. There is so much good stuff going on in Mr. Bauer's Creative Writing Class! First of all, the assignments week to week are structured to emphasize a different skill each week, which build on each other. Then, the students' work is peer-reviewed in the discussion boards. If your piece is not chosen that week, you can submit it to the Open Posting Board, where Mr. Bauer encourages peer-review posts by offering extra credit to the reviewing students. I also love that a few times, they have been asked to revisit a previous assignment and build on it with different requirements (i.e. take your First Person Narration, and continue the story but now in Third Person). The feedback from Mr. Bauer is extensive; I love it! You can tell he's invested in his students' work; he really gets into their stories, celebrates all their good stuff, and provides clear, constructive criticism. The "pièce de résistance" is the Class Final: a portfolio of all of their work, REVISED from all of the great feedback they received. This is my favorite part because truly learning to write (or anything really) comes from not only taking a stab at it, but by reviewing, re-reading, and revising your work. As I mentioned, my student is taking the delayed class, but I have watched a few of those class recordings, and the live class is where it's at! The students read their own pieces (building those presentation skills), and the live conversation is a great back-and-forth (practicing constructive criticism--both giving and receiving), with Mr. Bauer chiming in to keep the pace and offer suggestions and his insights on the pieces. My student has benefited greatly from this class, and truly enjoyed it. So much so, that they decided to wait to take Creative Writing II until next year, so they could take the live class. The reasoning behind it? So they could eek even more out of the class, to keep improving. - Parent Course Evaluation

My student loved this course. The assignments were so creative that she spent a lot of time just talking about and planning for her homework which is fun to hear and you don't hear from most other classes. I helped proof many of her assignments by mostly asking "how does this relate to what you are trying to convey" to help guide her rewriting sections so I had fun as well. So glad they touched on everything from writing a script to haikus! It was a good overview of the different types of writing along with the constant word limit imposed, really pushed the fact that when you do write, you rewrite then rewrite, etc. - Parent Course Evaluation

My kid doesn’t love English classes, in fact, he doesn’t even like them. But this one opened him up. He loved it. He was motivated and really learned a lot! -Parent Course Evaluation