Storytelling class

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This semester, I'm in a storytelling class. The prof and other grad students seem pretty NT, though it was hard to tell. Anyhow, it was like there was this huge gap. They were talking about how you should feel passionate about stories, and this sort of confused me. I like to write about stuff, but there's nothing I feel like walking up to random people and sharing. Then it went on about how with spoken storytelling, you can sense how your audience is feeling and adjust your story. The problem is that I don't automatically sense how someone else is feeling. There are hints, and I can more or less decipher facial expressions and tone of voice. So if people are staring into space or moving around, that means that you might be boring them. But it also seems like a matter of thinking about it and puzzling it out, which might be hard to do if you were in the middle of telling a story.

They also talked about assignments and I asked a lot of questions about what was appropriate. It seemed like the professor thought that it should be more obvious to me than it was, though I wasn't sure. One of the toughest things can be figuring out the rules for different situations - like if my friends think a joke is really funny, does this mean that my classmates will too?

The professor is overall really nice to me, though I got pretty frustrated today. Here's what gets me. The class seems to assume that some things should just be innate and obvious, like knowing what kinds of stories are OK to tell. But what if I did something analogous, like telling a story about technology and expecting the class to just understand any jargon I spouted?

OK, rant over, but does this class sound like a trainwreck waiting to happen, or should I be able to pull through it OK? Trying to decide ....

Wow, if it was me, it'd be a trainwreck, but I don't really know you well enough to judge. Sounds worse than a regular public speaking class... cause you're expected to interact with the audience and be passionate, not just informative. I can do passion if I'm reading from a script (like a poetry reading) but interactively in real time... yikes.

I took an extra-curricular class like that once, got an award for excellent public speaking skills.

Eh, the people are pretty nice, but being told how I should feel about something just seems wrong. It's like ... for many of us when we were younger, there was pressure to be more like NT folks, and maybe punishment when we weren't able to do this. The class isn't brutal, but being told how I should be affected by something feels like the same pressure in nicer-looking packaging. By the end of the class, I felt unreasonably angry, and this was a little confusing. Maybe the situation just struck a raw nerve?

It probably did. That would make sense. I can see a few options that could be taken with a class like this:
One, ignore what they're saying about feeling because they don't have enough data to make any kind of judgement on what you should and shouldn't feel. Just take what you like from the teaching, leave the rest, do the assignments your own way (but without telling them your reasons for doing it that way) and see how they grade you.
Two, and this method sucks but might be necessary if you need to pass the class, try to figure out what kind of reactions they want and mimic them.
Three, and this is the risky one, start telling the stories you would write about but normally not share, and see how they respond to it, cause they've still got no right to dictate how to feel, and that way you don't have to screw around with a facade.

Thanks so much! I actually went for the third option and posted some of the fractured fairy tales that I'd written (and posted in the "Members Only" section on WP under the "Fractured Tales" heading). The first option makes sense too - just tuning out if they start talking about how something should make me feel.

Faking seems sort of dangerous, because it's not clear where the game ends. I was in a group therapy session, and they'd ask me how I felt. I tried to explain, and they'd be like, "No, how do you REALLY feel?" It was getting tempting to just start feeding them what they seemed to want to hear. But that seems like a slippery slope. I mean, why stop there? Why not just completely fabricate some things? So I ended up leaving that group rather than go down that road. There are some similar concerns about manufacturing phony emotional reactions for class.

Fair enough, my ranking of the options was a bit biased to my own point of view, cause I'd consider telling my own stories a lot more dangerous than playing their game... I spend a lot of time playing other people's games and I've actually got some skill at it. As for the group therapy, though, that's just wrong. I don't blame you for leaving. It is a slippery slope.