We were given an emotion and an object and told to write... Of course, then we were told after 20 minutes of frantic writing that he wanted us to expand it and build the characters with dialogue. D'oh.
(Y'know, just as I'm resigned to dropping the damn thing, it shows promise. Maybe the email from Laurie helped him think, maybe he really is worried... Maybe I just used my mad Polite Interrupting skills taught by years in the call center trenches to take advantage of a pause and bully him into full class interaction by asking a question that he was most emphatically NOT allowed to answer...)
( I had embarrassment and a bottle of shoe/glove stretching oil stuff )