In fiction writing, here’s one way of breaking down narrative modes: There’s description (of characters, of setting or of internal reaction), there’s summary and there’s scene. Of course the lines between the modes can be blurry, and of course a story can be in more than one mode, even in the same sentence. Still. We can help students recognize when they’re in the wrong mode at the wrong time–the most important moments of a story almost certainly need to be in scene–and we can help them think about how much of each mode will be necessary to make their stories work.
Author Archives: RobertRue.com
Education: Process
In most classrooms across the country, a student is graded on the things he/she hands in. Maybe the teacher throws in “class participation” to calculate the final average. But a grade should be more than the evaluation of a product. A grade should reflect a student’s engagement, curiosity and intelligent risk-taking. It should reward the seeking of understanding over the pursuit of the expedient answer. With those things in mind, we should devise assessments that give us access to a student’s process and not just to the end result. Then we should find effective ways to evaluate both together. The product is one performance of learning, and it should matter. But the process is the learning, and it predicts more accurately what kind of future learning a student will do.
Teaching of Writing: Instinct
Sometimes, a writer’s “instinct” is nothing more than the impulse to reach for the cliché phrase or the pre-packaged idea. We should assign exercises that force students to move beyond their “instincts” and to choose the second or third thing they think of, rather than the first… like this blog post I’ve assigned myself, which I have now revised three times.