Tag Archives: education

No Child Left Behind?

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Sure, they can pass tests. But can they tell time?

I had a heavy shock today in the Safeway Supermarket in Wickenburg, AZ when I witnessed the following exchange between a cashier/manager and the teenage clerk who was bagging groceries at her register.

Girl: Do I get a break today?

Cashier (after studying a break sheet): Yes. You have lunch at 3 o’clock.

Girl: What time is it now?

Cashier (pointing to the clock on the wall): Look at the clock.

Girl (laughing): I can’t tell time on that.

I looked at the clock. It was a typical wall clock — you know, the round kind with two hands and a bunch of numbers. It read 1:35 PM.

Me (to the girl): You can’t tell time on a regular clock?

Girl (still laughing): No.

Teenage Guy behind me on line: I can’t either.

Me (to the girl): And you think that’s funny? What school did you go to?

Girl (still laughing but now moved to the end of the next register; I think I was scaring her): Wickenburg.

We’ll cut the conversation here, mostly because I became outraged and had to be calmed by the cashier, who is about my age. I reminded her that I learned how to tell time when I was 5 and I’m sure she was about the same age.

The point of all this is the fact that today’s kids apparently lack basic skills that they need to get by in life. How can an 18-year-old girl not know how to tell time on a standard analog clock? What else does she not know how to do? Read? Write in full sentences? Spell the words that might appear on a job application?

How the hell does she expect to get anywhere in life? Or is her highest aspiration to be a bagger in a grocery store? No offense to folks with challenged kids, but mentally retarded people can do that.

Yet apparently, this kid can pass the tests she needs to graduate high school.

No child left behind? Sure.

Kids Ask a Lot of Questions

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A quick note from a recent flight.

I recently flew a dad and his two kids on a 50-minute flight in the Wickenburg area. The kids were aged maybe 8 (the boy) and 10 (the girl). These are estimates. I didn’t ask and since I’m not a parent myself, I could be way off.

My helicopter has a voice-activated intercom system. That means that anything anyone says into their headset microphone can be heard by anyone else in the aircraft wearing a headset. (And yes, I do have an isolation switch I can use to “turn off” my passengers, but I rarely use it.) I narrated the flight, as I usually do, and pointed out interesting things.

Now I’ve flown kids before, but these kids were different. They asked a lot of questions. A lot. In fact, they pretty much never stopped asking questions.

I have no problem with this. It’s great to see kids who are interested in what’s going on around them. And it sure beats the kid who almost fell asleep on one of my Grand Canyon flights years ago.

Since I don’t have kids, however, it was a bit startling to me. It made me realize the limits of a young kid’s knowledge. For example, they repeatedly asked me to define words I’d used — irrigation and skeleton crew come to mind. They asked a lot of “why” and “how” questions. It was a real eye-opening experience for me. It was also a pleasure to be in the position where I could share some of my knowledge with them.

But the part I liked most was defining those terms I’d used without a second thought, bringing my vocabulary down to a level they’d understand and perhaps teaching them a few new words and concepts.

Writing Tips: Master the Basics

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If there’s only one thing you do before starting a career as a writer, this is it.

Today, I’m doing a presentation for Wickenburg High School’s Journalism class. I suspect that they’re a bunch of seniors who are interested in journalism or some other branch of writing. Although I’m not a journalist, I feel qualified to speak to them about careers in writing. And since being asked to do this presentation, I’ve been giving the topics I want to discuss a lot of thought.

The Basics

The best piece of advice I can offer anyone considering a career in writing is to master the basics. I mean that quite literally: master the basics of writing. This includes the following:

  • Spelling. Yes, I know that there are spelling checkers in word processors — and even blog offline composition tools like the one I’m using to write this. And no, I’m not saying that you need to know how to spell every word you might ever write absolutely perfectly. But I am saying that you need basic spelling skills. This will help ensure that you don’t misspell a word that spells another word (and, thus, won’t be caught by a spelling checker) or use the wrong word (then instead of than, your instead of you’re, etc.).
  • Want more tips about grammar?
    Read “Grammar is Important“

    Grammar. Again, perfect grammar isn’t an absolute requirement, but a writer’s grammar should certainly be much better than average. Don’t use the grammar checker in a word processor — if you need to rely on that, you may as well give up on any idea of being a writer. The best way to learn grammar is to read and study good writing. I’m not talking about Dickens here. And I’m certainly not talking about blogs. I’m talking about The New York Times, NewsWeek, and other quality publications that are written and edited by professionals. Don’t get the idea that grammar rules are meant to be broken so they don’t matter. You need to learn the rules before you can break them.

  • Punctuation. This goes with grammar. Punctuation is pretty easy. If you can’t master it, you’re not going to impress many editors.
  • Style. Here’s where things start drifting away from what you can learn in basic English classes. Every writer should be able to develop his or her own style or voice. This is something that comes with practice — I don’t think it can be taught. Style includes vocabulary and word usage, as well as the rhythm of your sentences and paragraphs. I believe that the only way a writer can develop his or her own style is by writing and then rewriting. A lot. Every day. Once you’ve got your own style, you should be able to go the next step, which is to emulate (okay, copy) someone else’s style. In fact, a good writer should be able to write in whatever style he or she is called upon to write in.

Here’s the deal. If you try to start a career as a writer and you haven’t mastered the basics, there isn’t much of a chance of you getting a job as a writer. No editor is going to want to deal with submitted work that is fraught with basic writing errors. It’ll take too long to edit.

And if you expect to be a freelance writer, your chances of getting published are slim if you can’t submit an error-free manuscript.

It doesn’t matter what kind of writing you want to do — newspaper journalist, technical writer, advertising copywriter, short story author, novelist. If you can’t write, you’re not going to get work as a writer. It’s as simple as that.

A Story with a Point

And to finish this piece off, I’ll tell you — and that high school class — a true story. Back in 1978, when I started college, English 101 and 102 were freshman year requirements. These two courses took what we supposedly learned in high school to the next level.

I wasn’t very interested in taking English — I wanted to take a creative writing class instead. Fortunately, my college offered a way out. I could write an essay about a topic of interest to me and submit that for evaluation. if the essay was good enough, I wouldn’t have to take either freshman English class.

I wrote the essay. It was about how high school fails to prepare young people for life. I was 17 at the time — please don’t do the math — and already thinking about these things. The essay was a hit. I was exempted from freshman English.

This story has a point. Before I got to college, I had already developed above average writing skills. This served me well throughout high school and college — I aced almost every report and essay test question, mostly because I already knew how to organize and present my thoughts in writing far better than most other students.

These are the kinds of skills every writer needs to develop before beginning a writing career. If you want to be a writer, master the basics now.

Writing Tips

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Some wisdom from the trenches.

My meeting the other day with a wannabe writer made me realize that there are a lot of people out there who want to write but simply don’t have a clue about many of the basics. So I thought I’d start a new series of articles here. The idea is to share some of my insight with the folks who understand that they don’t know everything and that they can learn from other writers.

I realize that this sounds sarcastic, but I think it’s pretty close to the mark. So many wannabe writers simply don’t understand the basics of writing — or writing for a living. They have this glamorized idea of what it’s like to be a writer. They think it’s easy. And while it may be easy for them to write, it isn’t easy for most folks to make a living as a writer.

And that’s what it all comes down to. As a commenter here said, writers write. But if you can’t get paid for your writing, you’ll probably have to work a “real” job to earn a living. And that might not have enough time to write. So the goal of anyone who wants to be a writer should be to get paid for writing. Then they’ll have plenty of time to write.

My goal in this series is to not only provide tips to help you be a better writer, but to help wannabe writers or new writers understand how they can make a living as a writer and what that living might be like.

I’ve already written a number of posts that you might find helpful if you’re interested in learning more about being a writer. I’ve listed the ones that I think are best here:

I learned two things in the hour it took me to compile this list:

  • The list is a lot longer than I expected it to be. I wrote a lot about writing since I began blogging nearly 5 years ago. This list doesn’t include all the posts in the Writing category, either.
  • Before writing Saturday’s post, I hadn’t written anything worthwhile about writing since February 2008.

I urge you to read any of the posts listed above that you think you might find interesting. Comment on them, too. Your comments will help me develop ideas for new posts about related topics.

In the meantime, I’ll use the “Writing Tips” title for a bunch of short new posts that cover some of the basics. I promise not to be too chatty.

BE a Writer

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It’s a lot more than just taking a few courses in college.

The other day, I met a 20-year-old guy named Doug. (Not his real name, of course, but it will do.) Actually, he introduced himself to me. He’d heard I was a writer and wanted to meet me. He thought I wrote novels and when I explained that I wrote computer how-to books, he seemed disappointed. He told me he was going to school to be a writer. He wanted to write fiction.

I asked Doug what he’d written so far and his response disappointed me: “Nothing,” he said. “I’m only 20.” He then went on to tell me that he was still learning how to write. That’s why he was studying it in school. So far, he’d learned that stories had “a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Wow.

To understand my take on this poor misguided soul, you need to understand that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And I began writing when I was about 13.

I didn’t always want to write computer how-to books. Computers — well, the desktop kind, anyway — didn’t exist when I was a kid. I wanted to write fiction, just like Doug does. But I didn’t have any illusions about going to school to be a writer. (At 13, I didn’t expect to attend college when I finished high school.) So I started writing on my own. Practice makes perfect, right?

Years later, after following a career path that didn’t interest me and paying my dues, I found success writing computer how-to books. I didn’t go to college to become a writer. All I had was two semesters of creative writing. (I was able to skip English 101 and 102 because of my ability to write an essay that proved I didn’t need these basic English courses.) But I had years of practice — and am still practicing here.

So when I met a 20-year-old who wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t writing. After all, how can you be a writer if you don’t write?

I was disappointed and, in all honesty, a bit disgusted with Doug’s lack of insight and drive on his chosen career. (At 20, I already had my BBA and a full-time job.) But I didn’t want to be rude, so I thought I’d venture a suggestion. Doug was working at a part-time job that had a lot of down time — time he wasn’t particularly busy with job duties. I suggested that he spend his down time people watching. “Keep a journal,” I suggested. “Jot down bits and pieces of the character traits you see and conversations you overhear. You might be able to draw on these real-life characters when you develop your own fictional characters.”

As you might imagine, he didn’t seem very interested. And that’s when I decided to stop wasting my time.

What’s strange about all this is that I’ve been invited to speak to my local high school’s journalism class about writing. I’m not a journalist, but I’m pretty sure that the kids taking this course have writing interests besides journalism. I plan to share with them some of the “secrets to success” for being a writer. I think they’ll be surprised by what I’ve got to say.

I guess what I’m thinking about all this is: if you’re 20 years old and you need to take a college course to learn that a piece of fiction has a beginning, a middle, and an end, you’re probably not going to be much of a writer.

To be a writer, you need to be a writer. The only way to do that is to write.