This is more of a personal, subjective note. Being handed some arbitrary writing assignment that I’m not actually invested in and don’t actually understand what the teacher is really asking for, and then staring at a blinking cursor on an empty Word document with this buildup of frustration. I remember going through that my senior year of high school, and then I watched my girlfriend go through the same thing the next year.
I’ve written a lot over my lifetime, in various degrees in formality. I’ve written aircraft manuals and checklists, company procedures, lesson plans, primary research and scholarly essays, when it’s a subject that is at all relevant to my life, that feeling of WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING ME WASTE MY TIME ON THIS isn’t there. I took an intro to engineering course in college. We were given an assignment to pick out some engineering disaster, some calamity caused by a mistake made by an engineer, and write a ten page report on it. Being an aviation nut, I picked out the saga of the DC-10’s cargo door latches. I cited NTSB reports, the Applegate memo, the DC-10’s operating manual, and the eventual Airworthiness Directive that resulted. I pretty easily filled those ten pages. It somehow wasn’t the same tedious bullshit that discussing themes in Wuthering Heights was in high school.
The biggest knack to teaching is getting the student to care.
This is more of a personal, subjective note. Being handed some arbitrary writing assignment that I’m not actually invested in and don’t actually understand what the teacher is really asking for, and then staring at a blinking cursor on an empty Word document with this buildup of frustration. I remember going through that my senior year of high school, and then I watched my girlfriend go through the same thing the next year.
I’ve written a lot over my lifetime, in various degrees in formality. I’ve written aircraft manuals and checklists, company procedures, lesson plans, primary research and scholarly essays, when it’s a subject that is at all relevant to my life, that feeling of WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING ME WASTE MY TIME ON THIS isn’t there. I took an intro to engineering course in college. We were given an assignment to pick out some engineering disaster, some calamity caused by a mistake made by an engineer, and write a ten page report on it. Being an aviation nut, I picked out the saga of the DC-10’s cargo door latches. I cited NTSB reports, the Applegate memo, the DC-10’s operating manual, and the eventual Airworthiness Directive that resulted. I pretty easily filled those ten pages. It somehow wasn’t the same tedious bullshit that discussing themes in Wuthering Heights was in high school.
The biggest knack to teaching is getting the student to care.