Today's Reading

So, during my creative writing class (at my main college) we did a workshop with my story today. It was our first workshop, and another guy went too.
It seems that every time I submit a piece to this class (this is the same class I audited a few semesters ago) there is some big misunderstanding that takes up all of the comments. So people are basically just saying everything that I know already...
For example, when I turned in my story about the shadow boy a couple years ago, I accidentally used the word "medieval" instead of "fantasy" during my introduction paragraph (it wasn't part of the story, but just a brief explanation about something that I'd pasted at the beginning of my pages. Half of the comments in class were about how this didn't seem like a medieval world. to the point where the teacher said that people should stop mentioning it over and over... And even more of the written comments talked about it.
Then I turned in my very first pilot chapter of my Ashes story that semester. Since my last description paragraph didn't go too well, I didn't include one this time. And thus I got a million questions about how the disaster occurred, and that this seemed like it was part of something bigger.
I could have negated all of that by saying that this way part of a much bigger story, and that a lack of fuel an energy created the disaster.

So this time I tried to do the explanation paragraph well.
I wrote a piece from another story I have planned. It basically takes one of the main characters and retells the beginning of the story through his POV. Since we were doing a first person story, I thought it would be fun to experiment with his voice and view of things. It parallels the beginning, but is not the entire beginning. And indeed, most people liked his voice and character and everything.
In my explanation paragraph, I mentioned that it was part of a larger story. Except everyone took that to mean that this must be the first chapter of the story. So everyone thought that the narrator was going to change, and that seemed odd. Or they thought that more could be done to set up the beginning of the story.
Except all of those details will be covered in the stupid longer version... Which is why I left out those details. Because I don't want to have everything repeated (Though admittedly that probably wasn't the best idea, regarding this class).
There were only a couple comments that I actually found helpful. Because all the rest of the discussion was about stuff I knew.
Ugh. I should stop submitting pieces based off of other stuff. But those are the only short stories I can think of... all my other ideas are too long. TT^TT

And then I was reading all the comments on the train home. It was basically the same stuff we talked about in class.
But this one guy said that my story was bad because it sounded like it was being told by a kid, and it jumped around.
Well... yeah. It IS told by a kid. And it's SUPPOSED to jump around, because it's told by a kid. Did you even read more than half of it?
Sigh.

I think I know what I want to turn in for my second story. I wonder if I'll run into these same problems though...
Since we're discouraged from talking during the workshop it makes things hard to explain.