The Defiant Ones

A student wrote me an e-mail the other day apologizing because he was dropping the creative nonfiction class I'm teaching. He'd really enjoyed the first four weeks, he wrote, but his course load was too heavy and so he was dropping the class, but he "defiantly" hoped that he could take it sometime, maybe next semester.

I wrote him back and said I'd be happy to have him back in class if he "definitely" wanted to be there. But not "defiantly."

These days the news is full of the H1N1 virus. But I'm more concerned about the "don't read/can't write/ can't spell" epidemic affecting the youth of America, most particularly the ones I teach. Each year, it seems, I'm spending less and less time on the creative aspects of writing, more so on the writing skills these kids should have mastered in junior high. Sure, it's great when a kid understands, by the end of a semester, that the big letter goes at the beginning of the sentence and the little dot at the end. That's progress. But if I'm supposed to be teaching them to construct a compelling narrative with personal and universal appeal, I'm not able to do so. You can't build a house using only a screwdriver. And if you can't write a sentence, you can't write. Period.

Defiantly so ....