January 19, 2006

Reading

As a kid, I couldn't wait to learn to read. As much as I enjoyed Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Viva Allegra and cartoons ... these were magical things that appeared on the television at seemingly random intervals. Books I could see and were available on-demand. Luckily for me, my ADHD actually wound up helping me learn to read ... the opposite of what happens for many ADHD-ers. Besides having a manageable case of hyperactivity, and one which bounces between hyper-focus (focusing on one thing to the absolute exclusion of EVERYTHING else) and hyperactivity, it also makes me want to do everything at absolute top speed. As such, I was in high school before my mild dyslexia really even revealed itself. Why? Because I read so fast that I tended to read the shapes of words rather than looking at each letter ... as such, flipping a letter around or flip-flopping two letters didn't really change the shape of the word too much. It wasn't until I ran into problems in high school math that I began to suspect what had been happening all along ... and chemistry class confirmed it. I don't know why I was (and am!) more likely to flip numbers and +/- signs around than I am to realize that teh and the are not the same word, but so be it.

I picked up some reading before school started, of course, however, my mom seemed conflicted about whether or not to encourage this. After all, you're supposed to learn to read in school ... I think she was afraid of doing something wrong, so she did little before school started. However, once school did start and I began going like gangbusters, I had all sorts of books, little workbooks and kids' "texts" on phonics. I declared myself the fastest reader in my kindergarten class. Naturally, I had to prove my skills, so I snagged a book off the shelves and gave a demonstration. The other kids didn't believe that I'd really read the book that fast ... so I summarized The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese.

From that point on, I was hooked not only on reading stories, but also on reading as much as possible quickly.

This led to a few issues with teachers and librarians, but not quite in the ways you would think.

My first big run-in with a librarian was at St. Louis Catholic school in Austin ... in second grade. I had literally read everything in the little kids' section of the library and I was bored. Those of you who know me at all know that letting me get bored in any way shape or form is BAD. So, I walked out of the little kids books and over into the "big kids'" books. I wandered around for a while and finally made a selection. I remember that the title had intrigued me, the cover was okay ... and I began flipping through the book and became engrossed in the story. So, I trotted up to the check-out counter and placed my new-found adventure there, prepared to go back to class, kick back and get lost in this new world.

"You can't read that."

I was startled. "What?"

"I can't let you read that. You can't read it."

The librarian was a nun in at least her late 60s. At this moment, she is frozen in my mind as the perfect caricature of a nun ... sour faced, old, dour and, of course, frowning.

I protested that I could too read the book. She was disparaging my abilities! She insisted again that I couldn't. So, being the logical little kid that I was, I picked up the book and began reading aloud to her. In a whisper. Cuz we were in the library, after all.

"But you don't understand what you just read."

So, I paraphrased it for her. At that point, irritated beyond all reason, she yanked the book off the counter and pointed at the little kids' section. "Go back to where you belong!"

I was furious and shaking, but didn't know what else I could do. I went back to class.

I told my mom about it and she took me to the public library and showed me some of the books for older kids. I was in heaven. But, when I went to check out, I was again stymied. I had a green library card, a restricted card. Mom had to check out half of my books on her card because they were from the "young adult" section instead of the kids' section. But, at least I got my books this time.

By third grade, I had an adult library card and a new school where the librarians encouraged us to read anything and everything in the library.

It took about three weeks before I was bored to tears with most of the books. I finally stopped taking teacher recommendations and looking for an interesting cover. Instead, I literally went through the library looking for the thickest book I could find.

Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet.

I was now completely hooked on science fiction and fantasy books ... and on Robert Heinlein in particular. I quickly tore through all of his "kids'" books in our school library and then in the public library ... and moved on to his adult books and other science fiction writers. I read Clark and Asimov, but I kept coming back to the prolific Heinlein because he made me think about how our world works ... not just the science of rocketry, but our various cultures and societies.

Now, growing up reading science fiction, there's one set of "rules" you learn very early, very quickly.

Actions have consequences.

And ... so do inactions.

Whether the action you take is to speak up or you decide to take no action and walk past, what you have done has changed the world around you. It might be a minor change. It might be major. But you have no way of knowing ahead of time how important that decision you're about to make really is.

To go ahead and beat to death the dead and overly dead horse that is the example of Hitler, let's what-if for a moment. What if one of people that young Adolf admired had told him he had artistic talent? What if he'd been really encouraged and nurtured to follow that path? Would the Holocaust still have happened? It's likely that it could have ... events that large rarely happen because of a single person no matter how much we prefer to have a single person to point at. But if Hitler had not been the driving force would it have been as bad? Or, God forbid, would it have been even worse?

We have no way of knowing.

You see, we go through life making our decisions, performing our actions and inactions as best as we can. But we don't know the effect that we have on others and the world around us. Sometimes a random comment will get one person thinking. Would I have been so determined to prove I could read "big-kid" books if that librarian hadn't been such a jerk? Maybe. Or, for a different example, a random comment an acquaintance dropped about affection made me re-think my concepts of relationships. It was an innocuous comment. Completely innocent. But when that was combined with a random comment that someone else made to my ex, she began thinking about relationships. Eventually we both realized that our ten-year relationship had passed a crossroads quite a while back and that we had both taken vastly different roads without noticing.

If those other people had not made their comments, it might have taken us years longer to realize that we had grown far, far apart and were doing more damage than good by staying together. Would we have still gotten to that realization? Probably so. The people making those comments didn't split us up. Shoot, they didn't even cause any problems. We already had the issues and had chosen to ignore them (or neglected to notice ... essentially the same difference).

Did those people cause us to break up? Of course not. In the short term, they might have felt as if they broke us up ... but they simply acted as a catalyst for something that had been brewing for years.

In the last year or two I've spent some time trying to track down some of the folks I went to school with ... elementary, junior high, high school ... people who meant something to me ... people that I would love to know how they're doing.

And, in doing so, I've discovered things not just about them, but about myself as well.

One last story today and I'm done for a while. Bear with me :)

When I moved to Arlington (Texas - not Virginia), I was scared and I was exhausted. I'd bounced schools for what was now the fourth time in four years and I was exhausted with the effort of trying to keep up with so many changes. Despite that, the one thing I've heard repeatedly from these folks who knew me back in the day is "you never did let the man keep you down." As it turns out, the mere fact that I was who I was (and am) seemed to register with several people.

Let me put it this way ... when I first got to my new school in Arlington, the teachers did not believe that I was so far ahead of their students in both reading and math. So, rather than find me a tutor ... or put me in their highest reading and math groups, they put me in their second-highest groups. I don't know why. I just know that I was depressed at having moved, and now I was "behind" in school as well. I chose, for a while, to do nothing.

After several weeks, I got mad. I began working ahead in my language arts class ... and then asking to go to the library. Constantly. Within about a week of this behaviour, I was moved up to the highest language arts class. Math, however, looked to stay stagnant until the day the teacher of the highest group stated, "Anyone who belongs in the high math class, come over here."

Now, a lot of third graders would not do what I did. But I was mad and frustrated and I had simply had enough. I got up and walked over with the other kids in the high math class. The teacher gave me the evil eye. And then asked, "Do you belong here?" I mustered up all of my self-worth, stared her straight (and rather defiantly, I'm sure) and said, "Yes." She didn't make my life easy ... but she did let me stay.

What does this have to do with a discussion about how our actions (and inactions) affect others?

I've now had two different people tell me that just knowing that I did things like that gave them the confidence to try to stand up for themselves as well.

I didn't know that then. I didn't do those things for other people, I acted for me. As I've found out now, those particular instances had a better and more powerful turnout than I would have ever guessed. They seemed like such little and self-oriented actions to me then.

Am I saying all of this to show what an effect I've had on the world? Don't make me laugh! My ego's not nearly that big. Actually, I'm far more impressed with the little kid who tried to take on every injustice than I am with the adult who gets so very tired of all the fighting.

In fact, those examples are the ones that turned out well. I don't know all of the small actions I did that turned out badly. What chance comments have I made about life the universe and everything that perhaps devastated someone else's worldview ... and I didn't even notice?

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Biggest lie in the English language.

"Why can't you just?" "Who told you that you could?" "I wish we had a place to go." "You can be anything you want to be." "Just do it."

These phrases can inspire and condemn ... and we never know what effect they'll have until after they're uttered and it's too late to call them back.

Of course, the flip side of that is, if we stay silent, we don't know what effect that will have until the moment has passed and it's too late to say anything at all. Or what effect we could have had if we'd spoken up.

Reading books, reading situations, reading people. Deciding to act. Deciding not to act.

It all has consequences and we have to live with those choices and consequences every day. To give up on deciding to act or speak is to give up on life itself and withdraw from the human race.

I choose to live. I choose to continue screwing up in the hopes that I'll get some things right. Hopefully more right than not. But I have to keep trying.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:29 AM | Comments (9) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | TrackBack | Stumble

November 30, 2005

Wakonse

Northwestern Michigan.
On the lake, by the town of Shelby ... there's a large campground called Camp Miniwanca.

Every year, the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching is held at this beautiful campsite. Rare in the land of ivory towers, Wakonse isn't discipline specific ... you can find the most hard-core scientist chatting with a literature professor and a grad student in sociology.

I got to go there in 2002 and 2003 ... and I learned a great deal both times. I learned that there really are those in higher education who are interested in pedagogy and how students learn. There are professors who actually work hard at making their classes both valuable and interesting.

During the day attendees go to seminars on teaching, sometimes it's a seminar on teaching within your field, but most of the time it's a seminar on how to adapt different techniques to different types of classes. There's a segment taught by undergrad students to make sure the stuffy old professors remember what it's like to be in college -- and particularly what it's like today. And then, everyone who attends also gives a talk at some point ... a mini-seminar. The "fun" part is that you don't know exactly what you'll be talking about until after you arrive at the conference. That's to keep some of the perfectionist-types from over-preparing. You're supposed to lead a discussion with a short presentation -- not lecture for an hour.

The evenings are for socializing, getting to know people from other disciplines, watching the sun set over Lake Michigan.

I miss teaching.

These two pictures of night falling on the campgrounds sum up my mood perfectly this week ... that mood is why I've resorted to posting other people's funny ... I've been a little too introspective lately.

Enjoy the pictures. Like the word Wakonse (Lakota Sioux for to teach or to inspire), the photos are meant to inspire.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:29 PM | Comments (5) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | TrackBack | Stumble

November 29, 2005

The Wisdom of Jeremy

The following two essays have been around on the internet for at least two years that I know of ... no one seems to know if they're for real or not ... whether a high school student wrote it (as has been proposed by someone claiming to know Jeremy) ... whether the student seriously believed any of it ... if the teacher passed the student or not .... as Jeremy says, "we may never know."

But that's okay, because they're well worth reading ... if you haven't run across these before ... put the beverage down until you're done. I'm not responsible for the state of your desk, monitor, keyboard or anything else ....

Originally discovered at: http://douglas.min.net/essay/

Jeremy Lavine
Period 3

Coming in like El Niño!

El Niño is spanish. It is the spanish word for child. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous. It kills people and burns down trees. This child is more than a child. It really isn't a child at all. It is a storm. A deadly storm that kills people and burns down trees.

Warm water usually builds up around australia. But not anymore with el niño. El Niño moves the warm water from australia to somewhere else, namely to other places. Where are these other places? These are places that also have water, but water that is usually not as warm as the warm water El Niño moves to these said other places. These other places are to the east. Of the water.

In Peru, they have many names for many things. One of the things they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living. If we had a word for this kind of people that word would be "fisherman". But we don't. In Peru, they have different names for things than we do in America. They call that kind of people "pescadores". That's Spanish. That's what they speak in Peru. When El Niño comes, these "pescadores" can't catch any fish. El Niño is caused when the Peruvian gods get angry. They have been angry for millions of years and have made El Niño for millions of years. Many many moods ago, the Peruvians committed human sacrifice to satiate their gods and end the flood that was caused by El Niño. In today's modern dog-eat-dog work-a-day world of scientists, diplomats, McSalad Shakers, and George Bush Jr., we no longer have access to such solutions. We are too proud. We will not commit human sacrifices. We refuse to satiate the Peruvian gods. Thus, they remain angry and keep killing us and burning down our trees with El Niño.

Instead of satiating the gods, many of these "scientists" have tried to control El Niño with "science". They put up expensive fish-attracting-bueys that run on flashlight batteries. Imagine, fighting the power of the gods with flashlight batteries! Needless to say, this didn't work and everyone died.

Jeremy Lavine
Period 3

Lightning!!!

What is lightning? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Does it have a meaning? Where does it come from? What is it made of? Is it made of light? Some might say it was made of light. Others contend that lightning is made of fire. People used to think that lightning was made of fire. Fire in the sky. Fire that killed people and knocked down trees. Before Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father. He father founded that lightning is made of electricity. Electricity in the sky.

But what of the Greek myths, of the Greek god Zeus and of the popular image of Zeus -- a Greek God -- throwing down lightning bolts to kill people and knock down trees. Where did he find the time? And what of lightning being made of fire? In this workaday world in the era of the founding father Benjamin Franklin we have no time nor patience for such concerns. These are for third world and schizophrenics.

Some people do not understand that lightning is destructive. They ignore the wisdom of their elders and of the founding father Benjamin Franklin. They think lightning is a lie perpetrated by people with a vested interest. At their own peril!!! Lightning kills people and knocks down trees!!! It a power of destruction exercised by the Greek god Zeus, the mightiest of Greek gods!! But they do it: they ignore such wisdom and taunt the powerful exercise of destruction and they worship their idle gods and stand near trees. At their own peril!! Lightning has the killing power to kill people and the destructive power to knock down trees! When you stand near trees, they will be knocked down by lightning and you will be killed by lightning! There is no escape. Lightning will knock down the tree and knock down your soul. Trees are tall.

Many things are tall. Many things attract lightning. But do the two correlate? A recent study says yes. It says that being tall and attracting lightning do correlate. That means that being tall corellates with being struck by lightning. You die when you are struck by lightning, and your tree is knocked down.

Some people try to measure lightning, they take measurements of it. They use balloons and rockets and their imagination and determination and research money and they put it all in the mixing bowl and they mix in storms -- storms with lighting -- and so they mix in the lightning and then they get the product of they're lucky of measurements about lightning from the storm? What kind of measurements? We may never know ...

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:01 AM | Comments (7) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | TrackBack | Stumble

November 6, 2005

Laptop Disaster

Today's students have grown up with computers. Either in the classroom or at home -- or both, if they're lucky -- they know how to email, hit Napster and Limewire.

Are our kids really computer savvy? Here's some stories from the trenches, stories from Notre Dame freshmen within the last ten years.

1) A student on looking at the computer the first day of class, picked up his mouse and placed it on the screen to move his cursor. He didn't discover his mistake until after he'd already asked the student next to him how you could see through the mouse to the screen.

2) Another student could not understand why everything she wrote on her computer in the dorm room would not save. Every day she'd come to class in tears ... all the work she'd done for all of her classes just was gone! So, I took her to a computer lab and watched how she saved her work.

She never hit save. Just turned the computer off. Her older sister had set Word to auto-save every minute or so. As a result she thought computers automatically saved everything.

And ... the best story of all --
"Jake" had started off the semester with a bad attitude, but when he found out that when I said they could write on anything even slightly pertaining to education, for the semester -- including critiquing our class or how to best educate a tailback in the ways of college football -- he changed his tune.

He came up to me one day near the end of the semester, eyes downcast and body tense. Obviously bad news.

"I got my paper done for critique today, but I don't have it anymore."

It was Monday, and at Notre Dame that means a lot of hung-over students. I looked at him carefully. Probably not hung over.

"What happened?"

"Well, we had this party Friday night, you know?" I nod. "And I woke up at four a.m. and my roommate" he paused, obviously embarrassed. "Well, you know that we don't have our own bathrooms, we have one down the hall? Yeah, well, umm, we have a sink in our room and umm."

"It's okay, I get it."

"Well, I woke up at four and I thought he was using the sink. But he wasn't." His eyes flash again, obviously, if you'llve forgive me, pissed as hell at his roomate.

"He wasn't peeing in the sink, he was peeing in my laptop! The whole damn thing's fried!"

"No!" I'm completely sympathetic at this point.

He rants and raves for a few minutes more, obviously his roommate hates him, they've been having problems all semester. And, of course, the dorm rector finally decided to step in.

Best excuse ever ... my roommate thought my laptop was a urinal!

 

(Actually, it's not an excuse ... it's a damn good reason not to have his paper ready for class!)

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:40 PM | Comments (6) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | Stumble

August 7, 2005

English 109: Composition and Literature

As another September looms ever closer, I realize again just how much I miss teaching. In fact, heading into Target today, I suddenly realized I was completely avoiding the Back-to-School section of the store because, well, because it was just too painful and depressing to think about.

The first class I taught was the fall of 1995. I had 18 bright, shiny faces of first-year students at the University of Notre Dame. Having only started my master's program the year before, I could still really sympathize with the nerves they probably felt upon starting university.

The class was English 109 - Composition and Literature and it was, in my opinion, about 2.5 semesters worth of work smashed into one lone semester. Just going from memory, we were supposed to teach the students the following:

• how to use their email (Notre Dame does not require a computer class)
• how to use the Daedalus program, which was a tool to learn and work on the writing process
• they had to learn to prewrite with different sets of heuristics
• they had to learn to use Interchange, which was a type of early chat program included in Daedalus
• they had to learn to use Inspiration, another program which helped with prewriting
• we had to read a significant amount of literature, including a unit on narrative fiction, a unit on poetry and a unit on plays
• we had to also read from a small handbook on writing AND a large textbook on composition and rhetoric
• the students had to learn the writing process by writing at least three drafts of their papers
• the students were supposed to write a total of 7 papers, following the Aristotlean categories of exposition and argumentation
• included in those 7 papers, if I remember correctly, students were supposed to write a resume and cover letter as well (or this might have been an 8th major assignment, sadly, I don't remember anymore)

All of that in a fifteen week (plus a week scheduled for finals) one semester course. For first-year students.

Talk about a completely overwhelming course!!

I tried to pick accessible readings for my students, including a novella called "The Body" -- if you've seen the movie Stand By Me with Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O'Donnell and Corey Feldman, that's the movie version of this book.

I tried to help them figure out how to break down the assignments into manageable chunks - but the pace of the class was, as far as I was concerned, completely overwhemling. At the University of Texas at Arlington, where I had done my undergraduate work, we offered a class in expository writing one semester and a class in argumentative writing in a separate semester. Of course, we also had a graduate program in composition/rhetoric and had plenty of faculty and graduate students who were honestly intrigued with the theories of writing and with the best ways to teach writing. Notre Dame has an English department devoted to literary theory and criticism and just one full-time faculty member who was at all interested in theories of writing.

I was nervous as hell the first day I went to teach. I got there too early and paced around in the halls, trying to give the kids some time to gel and chat before "authority" walked in.

I started out by giving the kids the syllabus and going over the requirements of the class. We talked about some study skills tricks I had discovered along the way of my collegiate career that I thought might be helpful in this class. By the second class, of course, the first real class, I realized that I was in my element. I absolutely LOVED teaching. And I did my damndest to help "my kids" do their best.

Naturally, they groused -- who doesn't grouse about a hard and time-consuming class? But I tried my best to make sure that they knew I was here to help them, not to trick or punish them.

And the established professor who came to observe my teaching a couple of times was just delighted with what he saw and gave me a whole-hearted thumbs-up.

About three quarters of the way through the semester, I realized that the kids were not reading all of the textbook readings. I was appalled only in that I was grading their papers based on some of the lessons in those readings - things we had not had time to cover in class. But they were diligent note-takers ... the only such note-takers I had in the entire nine years that I taught at Notre Dame. I actually had to tell them one day to put down their pens and just listen to me for a minute. And I gave them advice - not a lecture - advice on how to figure out how and where to cut corners and prioritize their various classes.

I loved those kids. I loved that class. Even the kids who hated me and thought that I played favorites, I still loved them. I bemoaned the fact that I couldn't actually reach every single one of "my kids" and I was determined to re-double my efforts in the spring semester. Not to be their friend ... but to really teach and reach them ... to make each one glad that they'd had my class instead of someone else's.

I used to cringe when people asked me what I did for a living. When you say that you teach English at the college level, they generally get scared and say things like "oh no, I really have to watch what I say around you." I'd always reply that spoken English and formal written English are really two separate languages to me and it didn't make me no nevermind how they spoke. (Hey, I'm from Texas, remember? Even well-educated Texans use those quaint phrases from time to time.)

And then, even other educators would groan at teaching college freshmen how to write. "Isn't that just a horrible class to teach?"

You know, I never thought so. Even the semester I came closest to losing control of the class. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. For me, nothing will ever beat going into a room of 18 year olds, nervous and jaded, anxious and resigned, eager and bored, all before I ever step into the room. Most of them hate to write and they loathe having to take a writing class. That's okay. I understand that. I hated my essay - writing classes, too. I still fuss over writing assignments and I know how different it is to write what you like vs. writing what you have to write.

But watching that click when they finally got the concept of the writing style down. Watching them suddenly realize that I was on their side and wanting to help them, not arbitrarily assign grades (punishments) on whims. Watching them get interested in learning something again.

Damn, I miss teaching. I really, really do.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:44 PM | Comments (1) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | Stumble

August 2, 2005

Teach Me to Write Funny

Flipping through comments here and playing around on BlogExplosion led me to The Dawn of Man where Redphi5h discussed creative writing classes and how creative writing can be taught.

He contends that "when considering the creative arts" we can no longer assume that teachers can really teach us much of anything at all. I both agree and disagree with that contention. You see, he's right when he says that most creative writing instructors

can be divided into two main types: writers who have achieved modest critical success amongst their peers; and the nest of crawling sycophants who aspire to this feat. Further, these people will attempt to behave objectively in a realm of personal sentimental judgements, and esoteric intellectual interpretations. Moreover, because abilities inherent to producing original works of art can’t be understood, let alone taught, the notion of being instructed at any art is somewhat paradoxical. Generally speaking, the most that can be hoped for is that students with potential find a stimulating, nurturing environment in which to work towards a sense of fulfilment. The real crime is that the host of poseurs can't (or won't) even provide this.

I've taken a slew of creative writing classes, joined a few creative writing critique groups and written my fair share of bad stories and decent critiques and on the whole, I think Redphi5h is not far off the mark here. In graduate school, I had one of those embittered profs who'd written one critically acclaimed (translation: no one read it except some American English professors) novel and not too much else. He stared at the ceiling while delivery a rambling critique of a story - which as often as not - completely missed the point and was about as helpful as a hole in the head.

In undergrad, I had a graduate student who taught a creative writing class. He regularly used the class as a platform to try to puff up his own ego and deflate those of his students. When I wouldn't play his sycophantic games, he got more and more paternalistic and tried to cajole me into a rousing discussion of his self-worth. The deal was this: I had a brief, walk-on native-american character who told a story to some kids at a camp. I used the B-movie diction that the anthropologists used to record these stories. Made sense to me - a group of barely teenage boys would expect something like that and some of the native americans I know like to use that method of speech to give an air of "mystery" or just to be a goof. No biggee. Well, this instructor insisted that no native-american ever speaks like that. Duh, my cousins are Cherokee and when they talk, all the "accent" you can hear is that they lived in the midwest their whole lives. But when my friend John wants to tell a story, about half the time he slips into this stilted speech because to him, it's part of the ambience of the piece. Now, the deal is, this story is less than a tenth of the entire short story that's being critiqued and this instructor has now taken it on as a cause. It would have been enough to say, you gotta be careful doing this, you might piss someone off.

But I've also had some wonderful instructors who helped me to hone my craft. Did they teach me to write? Did I teach myself?

Well, this is the question that I really want to discuss. You see, I think that creative arts can be taught -- but not by the traditional methods. (And, I think this is a part of Redphi5h's argument as well.)

First, you can't go into any creative writing classroom and assume that this teacher is the fount of all creative writing knowledge and he's going to pour some of those little driplets of wisdom into your wading pool. Let's face it, if your creative writing instructor thinks/acts that way, he's a drip and not worth much of your time. Instead, you have to go into these classes willing to figure things out on your own.

But then, I think it should be that way with any class, not just creative writing classes. The whole point of learning something is NOT to get a grade or a diploma -- even though when you're forced to take chemistry that you're positive you'll never use again, it certainly seems like that's the only point.

Every teacher who is interested in helping others learn is more interested in being a guide to help you through your learning process than in "imparting grand wisdom."

So if you go into a creative writing class, expecting to explore how you write, expecting to try to examine how others string together words until you believe in the character, and some practice in front of readers, you can learn a LOT from a creative writing class.

If you go into a creative writing class expecting the teacher to "larn ya" you're in a lot of trouble. You might learn how to mimic the teacher or another writer - and that can be valuable - but you're not really going to learn to find your own voice.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:17 AM | Comments (1) | Why Johnny Won't Learn and Mrs. Curnutt Is Tired of the System | Stumble