I spent most of Thursday grading the first round of Brief Assignments for ENGL1301 and the most frequent commentary students had about writing was that they hated it because they weren’t any good at it. I rolled my eyes more times than I could count because writing well is not something that one can do overnight. Looking back at my own first attempts at writing creatively I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I was awful. Thankfully, I kept trying. I submitted my work to online archives and got helpful feedback and suggestions and I tried again. With every story, every word typed into a Microsoft Word document or written in slanting cursive I got a little better and a little better and I’m still getting better.
I am going to go ahead and sound like an old man waving his cane and grouching about young whippersnappers in my front lawn but this generation is the generation of instant gratification. Patience and perseverance are almost nonexistent qualities in the youngsters of today. With the advent of the internet and its plethora of online databases that take less than fifteen minutes to search this generation has become accustomed to getting results fast. What’s more, there are things we call “Life Hacks” which make life even easier than it already is.
All of this it getting to the point where it’s more than a little ridiculous.Working hard is becoming a foreign concept to most young people and I am no exception. I am an incredibly lazy person and instant gratification is my bread and butter so I have to work to overcome that mindset in order to improve in my chosen field of creative writing. I constantly have to remind myself that instant result are not the goal, that most of what I am doing is part of a process, a long, never ending process.
Students need to be encouraged, whether they see themselves as good writers or not, to just write. I feel that it’s important to tell students that it doesn’t really matter what they’re writing so long as they are writing. They need the practice. They need to figure out what their style is. And they need to get feedback from other writers so they can keep learning and improving. Writing takes work, long hours of hard work but the rewards are infinite and that is something that is difficult to teach in this day and age.
I really like how you approached this as a writer and not as a teacher. Your advice is perfect for a novice writer. The most important thing that any writer can do is practice! Write, revise, write again. You are absolutely right about this generation and instant gratification. It is important, like you said, to show young writers that proficiency takes time.
ReplyDeleteI'll play devil's advocate for a second here: Rather than trying to push students back into a pre-Internet generation, how can we take advantage of the resources they have as a generation? You mention the annoying convenience of "Life Hacks." I can honestly say I just mentioned a "life hack" the other day in Intro to Tech Comm. (To Google search specifically for a PDF of a text, type "pdf: TEXTNAMEHERE").
ReplyDeleteTheoretically, because students no longer have to spend hours poring over library books to research a topic, they should be a generation of more efficient writers. If our parents' generations spent ten hours on a paper and four of those hours were research, shouldn't students of this generation be able to spend two hours on research and utilize those "extra" two hours revising their writing?
Students are often told to "Work smarter, not harder." As simplifying as it is, there's logic in that mantra.
P.S. Have you seen any of the anti Life Hacks? You might get a kick out of this: http://imgur.com/a/pyimg
Nice post, Colleen. Some people argue that one can't teach writing, at all. That we learn to write solely through reading a lot. I'm not sure about that. I think writing is a learned skill, learned through reading but also through writing, and through thinking and reflecting over the quality of that reading and writing, and we can play a role in that as teachers. Nice thinking about helping motivate students to be disciplined. Writing is hard work, and being steadfast in that work is half the battle. Encouragement, motivation...these are certainly difficult things to do, and it's a teacher's job to have a variety of tools of the trade to motivate learners. Those tools may include a variety of readings, unique assignment prompts, effective assessment, timely feedback, etc. You might work on including some quotations from readings in your blog posts as a way to work even harder on your blogs, getting to even more concrete information. I like Aubrey's suggestions for life hacks.
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