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

[j_cheney]

When I first started teaching 9th grade math, I had a weird day where I was working with a student after school, and watched her do multiplication. She carefully multiplied out each column, and finally got the correct answer.

What was weird was that she was multiplying 290 x 0. She didn't need to mulitply out each column...but she just didn't make that connection. Yes, this was a ninth grader.

I guess that my point is that if she hadn't had those basic long division rules, she wouldn't have -ever- figured out an answer that most more experienced mathematicians can simply jump to. It's a crutch for her, but she needed it at that point....

[ken_schneyer]

That's a fantastic story, Jeanne. Thanks!

[nihilistic_kid]

I'm a teacher by trade as well (in two MFA programs, plus a writer's club style set-up) and an editor. Two things I think you miss:

1. "young" writers aren't. The overwhelming majority of them are fully developed adults capable of understanding bits of advice more complex than "show don't tell" so long as someone in authority doesn't insist that "show don't tell" makes sense. A lot of the errors made by beginning writers are made thanks to attempting to follow this advice. (An example.) Giving adults correct, useful, and nuanced advice is not at all analogous to telling kids to skip their multiplication tables and get right to the proofs. If the elementary stuff is analogous to anything, it's really "Learn to read complex compound sentences", which anyone who wishes to be a writer should have already mastered. There's little to be done for a would-be writer who refuses to read, no matter how much oversimplified advice we can construct for them. Seventh-grade curricula won't help them

[ken_schneyer]

Interesting! An MFA program has the same pre-screening/master-class characteristics as a writers workshop, so maybe my observations about Clarion etc. apply to that situation as well.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "young" quite so often in the post. My students (I'm not a writing teacher) are mostly 19-to-22, but I have a substantial number in their 30s and 40s. Among both, I observe a similar difficulty with complexity in subjects with which the student is not familiar. Therefore I don't think it's a matter of brain development, but rather of experience with the material.

What we may be talking about, really, is the difference between whether to give advice in the first place, and how one follows that advice once it has been given. As a teacher of college students who submit written exams and papers (not creative writing), I have been driven nearly to distraction by two habits inculcated earlier in their training: The five-paragraph essay and the mirrored short-answer response.
(Sidebar: The "mirrored short-answer

[nihilistic_kid]

An MFA program has the same pre-screening/master-class characteristics as a writers workshopWell, some do, and some don't. Clarion isn't actually all that difficult to get into at all; it's the commitment that keeps people away. Some MFA programs really aren't competitive-they're just small thanks to being out-of-the-way and having non-famous faculty like me. All that said, I've also taught at Grub Street Inc. in Boston, the Writing Salons here in Berkeley, and now online at the UCLA extension-the only screening in these sorts of writer's clubs is that you have to be able to write...a check. And I've not noticed a significant difference in quality of the students at all. Those that read deeply as well as widely are much much better than anyone else; some of them are just loonies and won't ever get anywhere, and most folks just muddle through. Of the three people to whom I've said, "You don't need to workshop this material; you need to submit it," all three have been here in Berkeley. The university and the dot.com economy just

[ken_schneyer]

Clarion isn't actually all that difficult to get into at all; it's the commitment that keeps people away.

I feel obligated to correct this one, as this is a topic I know something about. Of course "difficult to get into" is a relative thing, but: the self-selection due to the commitment occurs before people apply, and currently the acceptance rate is about 18%. That's on a par with some of the most competitive colleges in the country (e.g., the current rate for my alma mater Wesleyan).

(Of course that rate is high compared to the acceptance rates for stories at magazines, but that's not a sensible comparison, since magazine submission is now easy and cost-free, while application to the workshops involves a fee, a lengthy application form and two stories from applicants who are bidding to spend $5,000 more dollars and six weeks of their lives.)

[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

[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! ;-)