I am interested in this free poetry class. I also teach writing freely and informally to some young kids, and I find that the experience is much more rewarding and productive than my formal teaching in many ways. I think that these kinds of opportunities are great ways to actually engage people in the process of writing, as long as they can avoid the tendency to fall into traditional teaching structures.

Let me know how the class goes.

The problem with the internet is that it is not designed as a communication tool: it is primarily a means of selling things. It commercializes and monetizes everything. Free email providers, social networking sites, and so on do not exist to help people communicate; they exist to sell products and services. (Even a blog like this, which lacks advertisements, still advertises products: books and films.)

One interesting case study in this is the disappearance of the zine/pen-pal subculture that thrived in the 1980’s and early 90’s but is now relegated to a few large zine distributors.

Anyway, I’m throwing myself into this battle directly by teaching a free poetry class for young people in the Spring.

I would agree. The move from formal correspondence to informal email is an example of the kind of shift in our modes of writing that I am describing above. It is not that email is bad necessarily, and it is not that email should never be used to write a quick and colloquial note. It is that nobody bothers to write emails well, not even when this kind of writing is what is required, so there are few models of good writing in the medium, and our writing habits deteriorate.

I do not think that teaching more grammar is the way to address this problem, however. I think that the way to address it is to have more of us consciously take the time to write new media well, so that others will have models of this writing. We need to show that we expect more from each other as writers and readers, so that there is a reason for people to learn how to write well, even and especially if they are now writing very differently.

Curtis,

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that people do not read well, so they are unable to write well, and I would agree with this. If people do not read carefully, with an ear for how the text has been written, they will not know how to go about writing themselves.

The other culprit is probably due to how few people read poetry anymore. According to the NEA, around 5% of the adult population of the US read poetry anymore. So…

It also made me think of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZpmrrcAPgU&feature=related

You have identified the problem exactly. People write poorly, not because they lack teaching in proper grammar, but because they lack models of good writing. The greatest service that teachers can do their students, therefore, is to offer them examples of good writing, in many styles and from many genres and from many eras. Students need to see living grammar in its many forms in order to have the familiarity and context to make questions of formal grammar relevant.

Your own experience can confirm this. When you see children just learning to read, a lesson on the parts of speech would obviously just bore and confuse them. Even a lesson on the names and sounds of all the letters may not be entirely relevant. Instead, you start with the letters in their name, and they begin to ask, “What sound does that letter say?” and “What letters are in Daddy’s name?” and so on. The teacher is there, first, to encourage the students to read at a level that will raise questions, and second, to help answer those questions as they arise.

In exactly the same way, teachers of much older students need to offer models of good writing that will challenge the students to think about writing and reading and language as such. In this and every other age, most people will never rise to such a challenge, but some will, and these few will find themselves on the way to writing.