What do you tell young writers? A response to Nick Mamatas.

[ken_schneyer]

Although I think of myself as a writer, I am a teacher by trade. The ideal form of education, of course, is to develop the highest intellectual faculties of the students at all times -- to be Socrates to each student. There is an optimistic vision of pedagogy (I first encountered it in Postman & Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity,

Comments

[davidkudler]

My daughter just graduated from a Dewey-esque middle school, and the truth of what you're pointing out here was played out there on a large scale. The school is, I think, very successful on the whole--it certainly served my wants-to-talk-about-everything daughter well. Where the teachers (and students) struggle the most is in the subjects where scut work is the order of the day. The math teacher, who's wonderful at getting the kids to see some really complex mathematical concepts, has been finding that graduates of the school -- especially those without an innate interest in math -- have struggled with arithmetic. The same is true of the Spanish teacher. Kids were very good at conjugating the preterite, but had holes in their understanding of basic grammar and vocabulary. The other parents of Julia's classmates were upset when their little geniuses placed in the introductory levels of their high school classes. (We were fine; our eldest, who came out of the local public middle school) was placed in a couple of advanced courses and nearly drowned.)

No surprise, but I think your thoughts are dead on. The writing taught in high school and college creative writing classes needs to start with inculcating a sense of discipline and craft, even as it exposes young writers to more advanced techniques and encourages them to find their own voice. Young painters are still taught the same kind of classical drawing and painting techniques that the Old Masters learned before they are encouraged to dive into the abstract or expressionistic; it should be the same with artists of prose.

[ken_schneyer]

Interesting! As a footnote, we're currently designing a lot of online courses over here right now, and we find that it lends itself well to subjects where a lot of research and discussion are useful. Generally the students hate it in areas like math and accounting, where there are techniques you just have to learn. My suggestion has been that they adopt a "Khan Academy" method, putting videos up showing instructors completing problems.

[davidkudler]

There you go! My wife's school too has been experimenting with the Khan Academy technique of "flipping the classroom"--having the teachers lecture/demonstrate particular concepts or techniques online, where the students can view it as many times as they need, and then having the class sessions take over the more typical "homework." This way, the teacher is involved in pointing out to students where they've missed a step or misunderstood a concept, and the worksheets/whatever become far more than simple make-work and rote.

It seems to work best for exactly the kinds of courses I mentioned above, where there are a discrete, definable skills or concepts that need to be learned: math, introductory language, science. For the humanities, the approach seems to be less effective, and, obviously, you can't "flip" an art class! ;-)