Every semester, Goddard asks its students to write a self-evaluation of their performance. For some reason, I’ve never posted them to Fluid Imagination, but I can’t for the life of me think why not. I mean, I try to be pretty open with everything, so why not publish this stuff too?

So, without further adieu, here is my self-evaluation for this semester.

What did you hope to learn and achieve this semester? Be brief and specific.

I asked in my study plan whether I could put together a creative thesis that lives up to the standards I’ve set for myself. As this third semester comes to close, I am feeling both more and less confident that I can. I’m feeling more confident because, as I add each word to the thesis, I feel better and better about where I’m headed; but I’m feeling less confident because the place where I seem to be headed is not the place for which I originally set out.

In the next eight weeks, I hope to complete the first draft of the thesis. I’ll know better at that point whether I’m happy with my final (first-draft) destination.

Comment on the development of your work, a brief assessment of critical papers, and the number of annotations completed, along with their titles.

During this semester, I completed 10 annotations. They included:

1. Forgetting the Impossible, which examines the concept of postmodern play using Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics as a guide.
2. Three Ways His Way, which asks how Russell Hoban uses the techniques of his craft to masterfully realize the vision of a post-apocalyptic world.
3. To Read, Perchance to Dream, which notes the way Raymond Queneau trusts his readers to relinquish their desire for certainty.
4. Footprints, which uses Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to suggest that writers must walk the paths their characters take if they are to their stories any justice.
5. What Does An Epsilon See?, which argues that the author of Brave New World neglects to interrogate the life that is experienced by the majority of brave new worldians, and that this neglect makes everything he writes reek of elitism.
6. “Banging My Head Against A Wall,” which attempts to understand the deeper meaning of the magical wall in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.
7. “Lepers in the Morning Dew,” which describes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch as a prose-poem infused beauty and shit.
8. A Little Sincerity is a Dangerous Thing, which tries to understand why a certain quotation in Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home brought me to tears.
9. “From Bin Laden’s Mouth to Cervantes’ Ears,” which attempts to use the model of fourth-generational warfare to create a model for a new literary form.
10. “Con-Fusing The Vision,” which posits a potential justification for the frustrating aspects of John Gardner’s Freddy’s Book.

I also completed my long-critical paper this semester. Entitled “The Dynamism of Utopia,” it explored the fluidity of genre by comparing and contrasting two examples of utopian literature, Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Leguin. It needed three drafts (including one in my G2 semester), but each draft was stronger than the last. My advisor questioned some of the critical tools that I used in my second draft, and after much internal debate, I agreed with her. The final revision replaced the theoretical assumptions created by those tools with more inclusive language that resulted in a stronger and, I think, more accurate understanding of the notion of genre. While I wasn’t happy with the first and second drafts of the paper, I was more than pleased with the third and final draft. I’m very happy that my advisor pushed me as much as she did.

I added two and a half chapters to my creative thesis this semester, leaving me with (I think) two and half chapters to go. I feel good about where I am and where I’m going, and if everything proceeds according to plan, I’ll have a strong first draft before the end of the next residency.

Please provide information about your teaching practicum (location, duration, student population) and briefly comment on the impact of the practicum on the your teaching skills.

My teaching practicum took place at Green Mountain College. It lasted the entire 15 weeks of GMC’s academic calendar. While it began with six students, two of them dropped the class before the semester concluded.

Overall, I feel that my teaching practicum was beneficial to my teaching skills in that it showed me what not to do as a writing professor. I went into the semester with all the ideals of a rookie teacher, and I closed the semester with all the disappointments such ideals engender. The next time I have the opportunity to lead a classroom, I will go into with a stronger willingness to adjust my plans to the reality of the class, a willingness that I, surprisingly, did not show during my teaching practicum.

Explain what you intend to further explore and/or develop next semester.

In the final semester, I intend to investigate, in my remaining seven annotations, how to successfully end a novel [on that note, Fluid Imagination readers, if you have any suggestions for books with great endings, please leave a comment with your suggestion].

In one of my process letters this semester, I wrote, “I promised myself that I wouldn’t make any major revisions to my creative thesis until I typed ‘The End.’” With any luck, that moment will come sometime before or during the residency at the end of June. After that, EVERYTHING in my thesis is up for grabs. I am looking forward to this moment for a variety of reasons. I think it’ll be the moment when I decide how “experimental” a writer I want to be. The moment when I decide whether to compromise the difficulties of an artistic vision for the clarity of a reader-friendly text. Or the moment when I exceed all expectations and figure out a way to have the best of both worlds.

I am both frightened and excited by the potential of this soon-to-happen moment.