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Old 2nd March 2009, 01:31 PM   #39
drkitten
Penultimate Amazing
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 21,629
Originally Posted by technoextreme View Post
Ahhh mystical magical inspiration. Why is it that teachers have a hard time with this?
Because it's hard making people want to do something.

It's especially hard making people want to do something that's difficult and not especially fun. Did you ever play an instrument in school? I, personally, found that practicing was both dull and difficult, and there were usually other things that would have been more fun, like playing outside, watching TV, or sitting and reading a book. For the most part, I practiced because my parents yelled at me if I didn't.

On the other hand, I enjoyed -- and still enjoy -- just "messing around" on my instrument; playing songs that I liked to play instead of songs that had been assigned by the teacher to master.

Similarly, I always loved to read -- certain types of books, that is. I loved adventure fiction, fantasy, space opera, detective fiction, and a lot of non-fiction as well (although I always hated biography). But I also hated most of the stuff I was assigned in high school. I felt -- and still feel -- that most of the 19th century should be taken out and shot. Dickens is bad enough; I'll actually give him credit for A Christmas Carol, but Oliver Twist is just tedious. And the entire "gothic-fiction" genre (Turn of the Screw) made Oliver seem positively exciting.

So I was the sort of student who would put down The Turn of the Screw to read Lives of a Cell. That delighted my biology teacher and ticked the hell out of my English lit teacher, for obvious reasons.

What could the English teacher have done to make me actually want to put down Lives instead? That is inspiration, and that's something that typically only a very good teacher can do, especially for a class of forty.

ETA: And, more specifically -- what could you have done? Go ahead, persuade the fifteen-year old me that what you want me to do is more important than what I want to do, enough that I'll actually go home and work on it.

Last edited by drkitten; 2nd March 2009 at 01:33 PM.
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