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Mar20
Defend Your Kids' Right To Creative Writing!

Creative writing has been pushed to the side by teachers due to circumstances beyond their control. We spend all our time here thinking about our own generation of writers, but we are missing a crisis that threatens the next generation. 

The Examiner just ran a heartbreaking essay from a schoolteacher in Washington DC. According to Erica Jacobs, the battery of standardized tests assigned to students are squeezing creative writing out of the American classroom.

I taught sixth grade for two semesters in 2003, and even back then it was hard to get kids writing. As much as I love them both, videogames and Internet attention spans have already damaged the patient process of storytelling. 

If we drop creative writing, we could lose a whole generation of new storytellers. Just listen to her essay: 

"Mike, one of our young, hip teachers, observed, 'Teaching students to write fiction takes a lot of time. And it’s not on the SOL test, so I just don’t do it.' "The others in the teachers’ lounge nodded sadly. Mike then added, 'Now I really feel guilty. In fact, I feel terrible.' Mike is an excellent teacher and includes lots of innovative techniques in his classroom, but he confirmed what I was beginning to suspect — English teachers now focus on literature, research, and writing five paragraph essays because those are on the SOLs."

I will never forget the mind-boggling joy of writing my first private detective story in grade school many years ago. I can't imagine a world without that in school. What can we do to save creative writing in the classroom? (Thanks to After the MFA for the link)

 


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