It's pouring outside again. A quiet evening at home, reflecting on writing.
Uh, it's like student writing is bad.
When I was in my creative writing class a few months ago, the teacher went around and asked us all why we were taking the class. One student there, a junior in high school said that "they didn't teach anything interesting in his english class there and he was bored, but he liked writing." As it turns out, our first assignment was to write a poem. Each poem was photocopied and read in class the following week. That student's poem was filled with so many grammatical and spelling errors that it was near impossible to make sense. I'm sorry, but at 17 years of age, if you're boasting about how bored you are of school, you should at least know the difference between there, they're and their, and the difference between a plural s and an apostrophe s.
Teaching a student how to write is one of the most difficult tasks a teacher has to face. I know I wouldn't be the writer I am today were it not for my high school freshman english teacher really drilling into me how to write a critical essay. I also have to give credit to having read thousands of books while I was a child. I don't think people realize just how creative a child is, and just how fertile their imagination is. Writing ability is very closely linked to reading ability -- I've found through the students I teach that often if they don't read well, they don't write well either. Furthermore, if they don't read well, this not only affects their english grades, but their grades in science and history as well.
When I was in fifth grade, the school had a book fair, but not the traditional kind where Scholastic trucks in thousands of books to purchase, but rather one where students of every grade level went through the process of writing and publishing their own book. Most books were thin with pictures on every page, and some were copies of other books found in the library with a few details changed. You could always tell what books the teacher was reading in class was because you'd often find five or six books with different characters going through the same actions. Even at that age, I felt a great disappointment in reading some of those books, knowing that the authors had obviously been lazy about doing the assignment. Every free moment I had was spent at the book fair, reading all the books there systematically, moving from table to table, until I was done. Some books, I liked the pictures more than the story, while others were the opposite. By the end of the book fair, I had so many ideas about the next book I would write for the book fair (which was a year away) that I just couldn't wait, so I went home and made the next book by myself. I ended up entering that story I wrote in a contest for an astronomy magazine. I felt disappointed that I didn't win (or even place), but reading the winning stories just made me realize just how far I had to go before I would be able to write at that level.
I think the reason most teachers don't have more intensive writing assignments is that they simply don't have the time to grade the paper, tell the student individually what they did wrong, how they can change it, and then have them re-write the paper. That was the technique used on us as freshmen in high school in Ciz's class, and it worked because by the end of the year, everyone in class had improved their writing. But, just as a good teacher can improve a student's skill in writing, bad teachers can degrade a student's writing. How? By letting them get away with laziness.
The problems with writing will just get worse. Television and Video games dominate childrens' lives, and now that they've grown up with it, it has become habit to them to come home, plop on the couch and veg for hours in front of the boob tube. Just take away their precious and watch them change from zoned out zombie children to beast children, screaming for the return of their precious. I watch more TV as an adult than I did as a child, and in many ways, it worries me that I find myself spending more and more hours in front of the soul sucking device. But if that's me, I have to wonder to myself, how many hours will the children of today spend in front of a screen when they become my age?
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