Saint Kosmas Conference
California
November 2018
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Our speaker today is Andrew Kern and he's going to speak with us about writing. As a way of introduction, Mr. Kern is a researcher, teacher, and consultant on classical education. He homeschooled, with his wife, their five children who are now grown. He has trained many homeschool and classroom teachers through an apprenticeship program in his company. Andrew has also helped start several private schools over the years and has been a classical education consultant for more than 20 years. He is the founder and president of Circe Institute, co-author of The Lost Tools of Writing, The Circe Guide to Reading, and Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America. He and his family live in North Carolina.
Andrew Kern: Thank you.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Since I am also a classical educator, I want to make sure everybody is on the same page about what we're talking about. If we're talking about writing, I think the first thing I would ask you to do is to define what you mean by the term, ‘writing.’ When you talk to us about writing, what exactly do you mean?
Andrew Kern: Well, everybody usually asks me practical questions and says, "Get your head out of the clouds." But now you're telling me to go back to the clouds.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Well, OK. I'll keep it practical. When you speak of ‘writing,’ do you mean just writing, or does that also include spelling and grammar, mechanics, etc... What all is included with teaching writing? What areas does ‘writing’ encompass?
Andrew Kern: What is writing? I am glad you asked that question, actually, because when I think of writing, I do think that you cannot think of it as a subject. It isn't one. And if you try to specialize and isolate writing from the rest of who you are and what you do, then you won't teach writing well. You can teach elements of writing well in that mode, but you cannot teach writing well. So, maybe a way of answering that question is—I'll be very practical with the answer—Writing is the art of taking thoughts out of your heart and soul and mind, and recording them on something more permanent than air so that somebody else can see them and read them. So that's writing. Does that work for a definition?
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: If we're talking about how to teach, then maybe a better way to ask the question would be to ask what are the goals of writing, or the goals in teaching writing? I think that's pretty broad, so you might want to break it down into elementary, middle, and high school. What are the practical ways that we apply writing to the teaching of elementary, middle, and high school students?
Andrew Kern: Let me give context, because it’s not a non-practical. I’m going to give you five different ways that writing can be practically explored, and then we can get more nitty-gritty.
If you want to become a great writer, there are at least five different things you need to do, or let me just say, there are five different paths that you need to walk. And, really, I'd say there are seven. So I’ll give you five, and then add two bonus ones. The five paths that you need to walk to become a great writer are:
One is the linguistic path. What I mean by that is—Don't hate me—I think you have to be bilingual to be a great writer. You have to learn a foreign language and you have to do it very consciously. The reason I’m arguing that can be illustrated by a simple point that when you translate from one language into another, there's an obsessive question that you can't escape. There are two parts to it. The first question is, “What word should I use?” And the second is, “Where should I put it?” That's what you're asking when you're writing, to be just a little ridiculous. You're always asking, “What word should I use?” and “Where should I put it?” When you translate from one language into another, you're imitating something that somebody else did in a foreign language really well, otherwise why translate it? I guess, textbooks. But otherwise why translate it? Right? And so then the question becomes, “In my language, which word should I use, and where am I going to put this word?” Very practical, isn't it? What word to use and where to put it. But when you translate, you're doing it in slow motion. And when you do something like that in such agonizing slow motion -- which is my definition for translation. “Trans” means agonizing, and “lation” means slow motion. No, just kidding. When you do something in such agonizing slow motion, you have to pay attention to it. Right? And so, you become aware of things in language that you can't become aware of—I don't believe—in any other way. I won’t go into all the paths as much as I just did with linguistics, but I believe you need to spend time learning a foreign language and translating between languages to become a great writer.
The second path is the literary path. By this I simply mean you need to read really good stuff, and you need to read it attentively. Some might say you need to read a lot of stuff, and depending on what you mean by ‘a lot’—maybe. I'm not a big believer in sponging counter-tops and calling the house clean. I like the idea of sponging the counter-tops, but I think we need to immerse ourselves more, so go for a deep read. I think you should find at least one author that deeply speaks to you—not only in terms of content, but in terms of form—and basically live with that author. Maybe it’s Shakespeare, maybe it’s Dante, maybe it’s Homer, maybe it’s the poetry of St. Gregory Nazianzus. But find an author whose writing grips you, and get to know why. Get to know how they do it, and pay close attention to the form. So that’s the literary path.
The third path is what I call the critical path. What I mean by the critical path is the syntax side of it, the grammar. You do need to know grammar to write well. The more grammar that's internalized, the better, but just like when you're learning a foreign language sometimes you just have to slow down. If you don't know syntax, if you don't know the rules of grammar, and if you don't know the conventions, then when you get stuck, you won't know where to go. So, there's the critical path.
The next one that comes to my mind here is the practical path. And by that, I mean get a coach, learn techniques, and master them. Imitate masters. Imitate people whose writing process you can get in touch with and imitate that process. That is the practical path.
I'm not remembering the fifth path off the top of my head. It’s in our writing program. But I’ll tell you the two bonus paths.
I think prayer is essential to good writing. You can write high quality rational writing, I suppose, without prayer. But you can’t have the Holy Spirit when you’re writing without prayer. Think of an icon writer and the importance of prayer to icon writing. Think of it that way.
The seventh is: Live a little. You've got to have something to write about. If you decide you're going to become a writer, so you're going to take writing classes, and go to college and study more writing, and then go to graduate school and do more writing, and spend your whole life in a room—it's not likely to make for good writing. I don't think you have to be a Hemingway going off fighting bulls every weekend, but live a little, so you have something to write about.
So, if the fifth path comes to my mind, I’ll mention it. Oh, and then I said I would get into some of the nitty-gritty about writing, because you want more on the practical path.
Can you repeat the question?
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Yes. I had asked, “What are the goals?”
Andrew Kern: Goals. Thank you. Really? That was the question? I got into that out of goals?
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Yes, I think it was goals.
Andrew Kern: Learn how to order your thoughts. It's absolutely crucial. The goals are:
(1) Cultivate attentiveness.
(2) Practice the habit of imitating masters so that you can see how that works in writing and in everything else.
(3) Learn to listen. You can't speak well or learn to write well if you don't listen, as you just saw me demonstrate. That was on purpose.
And I think the ultimate goal of writing is—which is the ultimate goal in all communication—is to resolve discord. And what I mean by that is within our own mind we have chaos going on. Have you ever felt that? I'm kind of hyper so I have too many thoughts bouncing off of each other. We have to find principles that unite them, that bring them together. We have to find the forms that make our thoughts peaceful, which by the way is the purpose of grammar. Grammar is so that your subjects and your predicates stop arguing with each other, and you bring peace to your mind. You resolve discord.
When you're writing, you're exploring things in a more stable way than when you're just thinking. Many people can explore something longer and more deeply by writing than they can if they're just thinking to themselves alone. Myself, I don't think well inside my head. I need to take my thoughts and put them outside here and look at them as an object. Whether that's a vice or virtue, I can't comment on. But that's how I usually need to think—To talk or to write, externalizing the thoughts. And when I do that, I can get more control over what's happening in my mind. So, there's that sense of self-control, that sense of self-awareness. The purpose of all of that is to bring harmony to our own minds, because our thoughts are scattered, and writing is a means by which we can improve that.
Even more importantly, I think, the purpose is to bring harmony to our communities, although I don't think you can do this without that first step. Harmony in community is hard. Does anybody care to challenge me on that one? Because if you do, I'll... No, I'm kidding. It's hard to get along deeply with people. It's hard to be understood by people. And writing gives us practice practicing getting along with people, harmonizing our communities, and doing it through things like making decisions through using the right kinds of categories of thought, the right kinds of analogies. Writing makes us very conscious of the way the things that we say affect other people. It makes us very conscious of the way things that we think affect ourselves. I think those are the real goals for writing.
There are other goals. I mean, you want to get good grades, I guess, but I'm not sure why. If you get a good grade it probably just means you can perform well. Some people find that really important, but they're all the firstborns. Just kidding.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: So when you're talking about this kind of writing, is that…
Andrew Kern: Sorry to interrupt you, but when you say, "this kind of writing," I need to clarify. I'm talking about all writing.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: When choosing a writing curriculum—as teachers and educators—can we just pick up any writing curriculum and expect that it’s going to help us be writers like you describe?
Andrew Kern: No. People do have different opinions about the goals of writing. Modern, conventional writing is fragmented in three streams.
There's one stream in conventional approaches to writing that is get inside your emotions, get inside your head, scoop around in there a little bit and see if you can draw something out and then throw it down on the paper. That's a crass way to put it, but the basic idea is look inside yourself, get in touch with yourself, and then draw something out and put it on paper. But, by the way, we're not going to show you how—but just get in there. OK? That's good for people who read a lot. Did I say read a lot? Yes. So, a person who reads a lot has an imagination filled with stories and experiences, and they can probably can go in there and say, "Oh, yeah..." But a person who doesn't read much, he doesn't know what to do, so he goes in there and gets lost, or just doesn't bother entering.
The second approach then—which is the opposite extreme, of course—is going to be the really rigorous: “Here's your tool, here's the process, here's what you do, and just do everything we tell you to do in this sequence, every day, and you'll get a good grade.” And the question of if you're going to become a good writer never really comes up, because the kids don't care. They just want the grade. And so you've got a mode of assessment that is supporting a mode of instruction that is counterproductive to the soul’s development and to the intellect's development.
The third approach to writing then I would just call gimmickry. It’s that somebody found something that worked for them, and they threw it into a program. Sometimes they're high quality, and sometimes they're not, but it works for them, so they throw it out there. You find that a lot of homeschool conventions will have things like that. It's harder to get that past something like Francis Hall, but you'll find if you're a skilled user of your gimmicks, you can often convince a publishing company to promote it for you. And those get left on the shelf a lot and they don't get improved upon.
What you need is all of that integrated. You need an approach to writing that's drawn from the way God created the human mind to work, such as we still have access to it, and I'll stop at that. But those are the different heresies, or errors, that writing programs tend to fall into—either it's get in touch with your feelings, or we have the rules just follow them. It’s kind of like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. It's like the two brothers. And then I guess the gimmick guy would be the one who gets him to eat with the pigs. I'm not sure. Does that help? Do you see the three different approaches?
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Yes. And those are in contrast to what you talked about earlier. So there would actually be four approaches, right?
Andrew Kern: Yes, that’s fair.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Because the approach you told us about would be the fourth, or maybe the only good one, in your mind? Is that fair?
Andrew Kern: I guess the way that I think of it is that anything that is in error is a corruption of something good. So the others are fragments of writing. They take a piece of writing and they get you to do this piece of it. And it worked for them because they weren't aware of all the other things that helped them write. So then it helps you.
But the fourth, if we want to call it the fourth approach, is the whole thing. It's as close as we can get to thinking of writing as a whole. And I really want to emphasize that point because writing—like I said at the beginning—you can't teach it as a subject. You can give it the special time in the schedule each day if you want to, but it's not a subject. It's something that permeates every subject. And I remember when I was in high school and in college, for example, a history teacher would say, “I'm going to grade you on the history, but I'm not going to grade you on the writing.” How are you going to become a good historian if you can't write? How are you going to "do history" if you can't write? It's a prerequisite for all of the arts of letters. It's not a subject. It's a prerequisite for every subject, if I can put it that way.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: That sounds like a good lead-in to the question: Can you talk about assessment? How can we assess writing?
Andrew Kern: Ohh... you don't want my opinions on assessment.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Can you give us some bullet-points or some practical things that we as educators can take out on assessment.
Andrew Kern: OK. Remember that when you're assessing something, whether it's writing or anything else, what you're doing is you are judging it. You are evaluating it. You are determining its worth and you are addressing the person who did it in a way that they are going to internalize, whether you want them to or not. Did anyone here ever get a “B” on a writing assignment? Raise your hand if you ever got a “B” on a writing assignment. Can anyone tell me what that meant?
Teacher in the audience: “B” means that you didn’t meet all the requirements of the assignment, but you met the requirements to a satisfactory level.
Andrew Kern: But what does satisfactory mean?
Teacher in the audience: By the parameters of the assignment. It's this discrete unit within the parameters of the assignment, and how you performed within those parameters.
Andrew Kern: Now when you were in school and you got the “B,” did all of that go through your mind?
Teacher in the audience: No. My father's voice went through my mind.
Andrew Kern: Which said?
Teacher in the audience: “B’s are bad.”
Andrew Kern: Thank you! “B” stands for “bad.” Now think about it. When a teacher puts a “B” on a student’s paper, that teacher means one thing. Well, that teacher means something. When this teacher puts a “B” on an assignment, this teacher means something that this teacher means. But then when that teacher puts a “B” on it, then that teacher means what that teacher means by a “B.” But when the student reads the “B,” the connection between what the teacher meant and what student interprets it to be isn't very intimate. And when the parent finds out that the child got a “B,” you have a third meaning. Right? So one letter, one symbol has three meanings, at least. And that's only on one assignment with one teacher, one student, one parent. Actually “B” means something different to most dads than it means to most moms.
Some students take a “B” to mean, "I'm no good at this. Why do I bother?" Some students take a “B” to mean, "Finally, I got something done." Some students get a “B” and say, "Ah, that didn't take much!" But what does it mean to get a “B”? What is the practical element of a “B”? It's going to be harder for you to get your Ph.D. Maybe that's it. But what is actionable about a “B”?
The letter grades on writing assignments are very rarely actionable. When you assess somebody, you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose? Can anybody tell me what is the purpose of assessing a writing assignment?
Audience: To find a way for the child to improve.
Andrew Kern: Fantastic. To find ways for the child to improve. Now how many of you have ever done music? How many of you have ever taught music?
(A music teacher in the audience raised her hand.)
Andrew Kern: Do you give grades?
Music teacher in the audience: No.
Andrew Kern: No. Why not?
Music teacher in the audience: There is always room for improvement.
Andrew Kern: There's always room for improvement. Isn’t there always room for improvement in math as well? Why don't you give grades in music? Might the answer be that it doesn't fit?
Music teacher in the audience: Yes.
Andrew Kern: And it doesn't communicate. It isn't actionable. How many of you have played basketball on a team at school, or any sport, intramural or extramural? When you played on any team, did you get grades? What would you have done if you did get grades? My guess is you would have said, "I don't want another class." Because in sports and in arts, assessment has to be meaningful. In the classroom it doesn't. You have to understand this. In the conventional classroom, assessment does not need to be meaningful. It doesn't need to be actionable, because there's nothing that you're going to do about it in the conventional school. But in sports, assessment does need to be meaningful, because you've got to beat the opponent. In music assessment does need to be actionable because the parents are paying—Right?—and they expect to see improvement.
Now what I'm getting at is writing ends with ‘-ing.’ That means it isn't an activity. It's a skill. And as a skill it needs to be coached. Writing needs to be coached. And so you need to assess it like you would if you were coaching it. What is actionable is: “You did this thing right. You did this exactly like you were supposed to. And you did this a little bit off. Move your feet differently the next time you do this dance. Let me show you how." That's practical, actionable coaching. That's why it's not done in schools. Because it's way too time consuming. We don't have time to educate kids in our schools. Understand that.
When you are assessing students’ writing what you need to do is you need to be clear ahead of time. Let me put it this way. A good assessment is this: When we assess our students, we must be committed to blessing them and not cursing them. Please understand that when you communicate to a person you can bless or you can curse, every time. And an assessment is a communication. Let me just back up a little bit and say that I believe that when you bless a person, you do something that leads to their fruition, to their fulfillment, to what is described in Psalm 1. They become more like a tree planted by a river of living water and everything they do will prosper and their leaves will not wither, and then they will bear fruit in season. That's blessedness. Cursing a person is anything that undoes that. You don't have to curse them to eternal damnation to curse a person. If you say something to a person that undercuts their blessedness, you have cursed them. I'm arguing that most of the assessment that we do in our culture curses children. I mean that not in some romantically emotional way. I mean that in a very practical, step-by-step, day-to-day way. We curse our children by the way we assess them.
So, what can we do to bless them in our assessment? Step one, I think, is: It has to be purposeful. And let me add this. The purpose has to be known. And it has to be known by the student. OK? They have to know ahead of time what the purpose of the assignment is and how they're going to be assessed on it. I don't believe it’s fair what goes on in most classrooms. Let me just say that in conventional education in which I am immersed, and I got growing up, there is sort of a game that goes on between teachers and students. And every now and again a teacher starts holding things out to the student and gets the student to try to anticipate the move the teacher is going to make. It becomes a contest of wills to control the classroom or a contest of wills to control what's going on. It's a very dangerous thing, and it happens in—I would guess—most classrooms. It happened in my class when I was a teacher. I’m guilty of it, in other words, which is maybe why I can see it. You have to avoid that. The student must know ahead of time what he's supposed to do, and whether he did it well.
In fact, in my opinion, the goal of assessment is the goal of everything in education. To put it in terms of the liberal arts, the goal is freedom. Right? Now what is freedom? Self-governance might be one way to put it. I'm governing myself instead of someone else ruling me. Think about that in regard to assessment. Whoever assesses you is your boss. Think of that in terms of accreditation for your school. Whoever is assessing you is your boss. If you're submitting to their assessment, you're saying, "You're my boss." You, as a teacher, are therefore the boss. But your goal is not to have them always need you, is it? Do you want your kids to grow up to always need you, so that you can tell them whether they're being good or bad? No. They need to learn to assess their own work. This is true in the moral realm and the spiritual realm, but it can also be applied in the writing realm. So what you need to do is teach them principles by which you're going to assess their writing, that they then understand themselves. Then when you're not around, they can go off and write something on their own, and they can look at it and say, "That's good. That worked." Or they can look at it and say, "Nah, that's not the best way to say that."
Now, granted, when it comes to writing, especially if you're a really good writer, you just feel it. Right? You just feel it. But you don’t have this feeling because you're so mystically aligned with the cosmos. You have it because you were trained. You internalized it. It’s like when you’re reading. How many of you still have to identify each letter and sound in all of the words you read. No, you just feel it. You go across it. If you're good at math, you just feel how numbers work. You don't have to go through all of the processes. You get it. And the same is true with writing. So, if you get to that point where it’s internalized, and you feel it, and you can say this is good and this is bad—well, good. But you'll find sometimes that you give it to somebody else and they'll disagree with you. Right? But none the less, there are principles that you want your students to learn about writing, and you want them to internalize them. When they internalize those principles, they themselves can assess how good the writing is, up to their level of maturity.
There are also elements of writing, like a sentence. A student who knows what a sentence is, has tremendous advantage over a student who doesn't. Paragraphs, chapters, schemes and tropes. These are elements of writing.
Then there are forms. Principles, elements, and forms. When you're teaching any of the arts—as far as I can tell, no matter what art you're teaching—you're teaching principles of that art, elements of the art, and forms that the art takes. So, in writing, a form could be a novel. Again, a sentence actually would be a form, wouldn't it? A form would be a sonnet, a lyric, an epic. These are all forms. A prayer—certain prayers take certain forms. An akathist is a form of prayer.
If you know the principles, which you have to be taught, and if you know the elements, and if you know the forms, and you've internalized them, then you can look at your own writing and assess the quality of it. Now when you're teaching a student, you're starting with very simple principles, very simple elements, and very simple forms, giving them a lot of practice so they internalize it. Then as they internalize it, you acknowledge that they've done so, and they then can build on that with increased confidence in their own thinking and writing. That's very abstract, so let me try to make it a little more concrete.
The governing principle of all writing is propriety. The governing principle of all art is propriety. Sometimes I ask the question: What's the one thing you always have to do when you write? What’s the one rule that governs all writing? And people say, “Clarity.” And then I say, “Read Huck Finn.” Why is Huck Finn allowed to use such horrifyingly bad grammar in the great American novel? Or rather, why is Mark Twain allowed to write such horrifyingly bad grammar in Huckleberry Finn? Because it fits.
Audience: It's the way they spoke!
Andrew Kern: It was the way Huck spoke—that's for sure! Yes! He's a Missouri River kid who is fatherless. How do you tell that story with a kid speaking the Queen's English? But Mark Twain was a master of the art, so he knew when to break the rule because there was a higher purpose. So, there are principles, elements, and forms. When you're teaching your children, you have to start at the basics. Don't teach them how to break rules they don't know. Teach them the principle of propriety all the time. But teach them that they should write with purpose.
One of the ways you do that in writing is with schemes and tropes. A scheme is an arrangement of words. They used to talk a lot about schemes and tropes. We speak of a rhyme scheme now. So, a rhyme scheme is called a scheme because it has to do with the scheme of the arrangement of the words in relation to each other. Alliteration is a scheme. After apples acknowledge their aptitude they will be alliterative. Assonance is a scheme where you repeat the vowel. These are schemes. They are concrete, easy to learn, easy to teach, because you can look at that and say, “Yes, that has alliteration,” or “No, that doesn't have alliteration.” The nice thing about that is they can do it very badly and still get an “A,” if you're going to give grades. In other words, they can do it very badly but still keep the rule because—and here's a crucial principle of assessment—when students learn a new skill or a new art, they will learn it badly at first, and that should be encouraged. They will learn the form; they will learn the mechanics. They will learn how to make awful alliteration, like I just did. Yes, that was really bad. It didn't even make sense. And I can sit here now, and I can assess it and say that was bad. You're welcome.
Speaking of bad—as an aside—Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales has a pilgrim, who is representing him, recite a story. He deliberately writes the most awful English poetry you will ever find. To be able to write poetry that bad for five or six pages, on purpose—that's a gift. It's just great. Does anybody know which of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is him in his own name? I can't remember. Shakespeare does a little of it in Much Ado About Nothing.
So, you're teaching these basic schemes, and they can do them or not do them, and you can say, "You did that." Now the principle of assessment that I'm getting at here is that what you want to get your student to do is write badly, so that he sees the surface reality. You want then to see the easy part to see, but then keep doing it, and as you keep doing it, something gradually follows. You know what that is that gradually follows? Judgement. You can say self-governance, or even taste. Now if they're never reading anything good, and they never get any feedback on their alliteration, they might perpetually write really horrible alliteration. But if they write alliteration on Monday, and then on Tuesday they read “The Song of Roland” or some English poetry from the 12th or 11th century, they're going to say, “Huh, there's a gap here." Right? And that's a really good thing when you can detect in your own writing the gap.
One of my favorite questions I like to ask at writing workshops is: How many of you consider yourself a good writer? How many of you never struggle with writing? And there will always be some cocky high school kid that will raise their hand, and I'll say, “Oh great! That's awesome! Write me an Elizabethan sonnet in Shakespearean voice.” Raise the standard a little if you find it easy! It's like a basketball player who always finds it easy, but they've never gone against LeBron. Right? So, there’s always a higher level you can get. But you begin with a very—what I like to call a caricature—a very basic understanding, something that you can even put into words. Then you have to practice it, and practice it, and practice it. Then it has to be put against masterpieces. It has to be put against really good stuff. Gradually through that process, the student develops their own judgement and their own ability to assess.
Now that brings me back to a principle of assessment which is: Assessment is always a comparison. But what are you comparing with? In II Corinthians 10:10 I think it is, St. Paul comments, believe it or not, on standardized tests. It's the most amazing thing. When I read this verse, I had to pull my hair. He's talking about the false teachers. They're challenging his authority as an apostle. He says of the false teachers, "But they, comparing themselves with themselves, and measuring themselves by themselves, are not wise." So when we get into modes of assessment that are comparing student with student and encouraging students to do that, and measuring students by what other students do, and evaluating their placement by where other students are, the biblical reference to that is the action of false teachers. We're imitating false teachers when we do that. Maybe that makes us false teachers. But, secondly, the application is, "They are not wise." I don't want to overstate this, and I don't want to draw this direct analogy that's right there, but it seems to me that we have to be cautious about testing that is possibly derived from false teaching, and shows us not to be wise. We need to be cautious about those two things.
Therefore, if what you're wanting students to do with their writing is to become better writers, assessment needs to be actionable. And it needs to be compared with something other than how they are doing against each other. So, what are the options? If you're assessing, one option is that you have a standard to compare to. Well, I guess you always have a standard. Standardization is different from having a standard. Right? In other words, your standard can be a masterpiece, or it can be a model. Those would be the two that come to mind. Can anyone think of anything else? It can be a masterpiece or a model.
So the masterpiece—if you're going to write an epic poem, Homer is your masterpiece. Go for it! A model would be something a coach put together. Let's drop the epic poem. Let's say we're doing alliteration. So, a masterpiece of alliteration might be drawn from one of those 12th century English poems that used alliteration so much, or Beowulf. So, you take this, and you show them this masterful work of alliteration and you say, “How is what you did like that?” That's what you want to focus on first. “How is mine like the masterpiece?” That's a really good question. And the answer might be only, "I used a vowel at the beginning of each word." That's a start. That's all you want them to do the first time. All you want them to do the first time is the minimum. If they go beyond that—Glory to God!—they're probably widely read. But in that discussion, another time—two or three or four days or weeks or years later—you might say, “Let's make that comparison again.” And now they're saying, "Oh, well, he arranged the vowels that way, and put one in the middle of that word, and started gymnastics with his vowels, and I didn't go quite that far, but I was able to move that one around there, and I was kind of... Yeah, I’m pleased with that."
So, you want to keep comparing to the masterpiece or to the model, and those become the direction of your improvement. Your role as parent or teacher then is to put in front of them the two. Your role is to show them what to do, then once they've done it, to compare what they've done with what a master teacher or a model has done. Do you see how that is actionable? And it's also not judgmental. It's also not just about rules now. Did you notice that? Now you're comparing—but you're asking them to make the comparison—because they're noticing what they can notice.
I think as adults we don't appreciate how fast our minds abstract. After you turn about 25 and get the prefrontal lobe all sorted out, it's amazing how fast adults can abstract things. But kids have to see it over and over. Even in high school, they have to see it over and over again. And when they do go to the abstract, sometimes the gap is so big between the abstract and the physical that they can't bridge it. So you need to keep coming back to making these comparisons between their work and that work, and gradually, gradually, gradually it sinks in to them what they're trying to do.
This applies schemes and tropes. It applies to paragraphs. It applies to sentences, to syntax, to spelling, You asked before, so I'll just say things like spelling and all that—Yeah, that's all part of writing, absolutely. You can't write without words, or letters. Now there are people who can write really well, but not spell well. So, if they're writing a really amazing paper about something over here, and their spelling is off, take the paper and let it be amazing. And then go back after you've given them that assessment that it’s amazing, and then say, “We've got to go back and fix the spelling.” But you notice how it’s two different things—the writing and the spelling. And notice what you’re not doing. What you're not doing is saying, “Really good insight, bad spelling, B." Do you see how unactionable that is? Well, it's mildly actionable because you've actually said, "Bad spelling," but what are they going to do with that? Right? How about, “You didn't use this diphthong correctly a few times.” Or actually show them where their spelling needs attention. Assessment has to be actionable or it won't bless. That's not as linear as you wanted it, but those are some thoughts on assessment. I hope it has some value.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Yes. So, I'm going to ask you a question that shoots off from that. It sounds like what you're saying is that we should be able to teach all students to be able to write, or to become good writers. Would you say that that's the case? Or are there some people who are just going to be better writers because they are gifted or they have natural ability? What role does that play versus being able to teach everybody how to write?
Andrew Kern: I don't know what ‘gifted’ and ‘natural ability’ means. I talked about the paths at the beginning of this conversation. In my experience and in my observation, kids whose parents read to them a lot before they turned three years old tend to make better readers and writers. It's totally unfair. In an egalitarian society they would prevent parents from reading to their kids. So, is that a natural ability that's being passed on, or is that because when they were in those incredibly formative years they were well fed?
It's an unprovable argument, but my suspicion is that there's a range, maybe there's sort of a limitation of the magnitude of your greatness that you can attain as a writer. But I don't think that many people get even close to it. And let’s just say for a moment—let's say that there are some kids who are gifted writers over here, and there are other kids over there that are going to struggle more. Which of them is going to benefit more from writing instruction? I don't know. But the danger of being gifted is that you can feel like you don't need the instruction. Wherever the child is, you got to push him. You've got to get him to the next level.
In the classical realm—it's kind of funny—in the realm of classical schools, tremendous emphasis is placed on the intellect. Right? Pride and intellect are really closely related. A very sensible question in the classical world is how do you keep the kids from becoming proud? And the way I see it is you've got three options: One is every time they do something well you can curse them. Two is you can stop teaching them so they don't learn anything, but that kind of defeats the point. And three is when they start feeling cocky, push them to the next math lesson. Not many people maintain their arrogance when they come across a problem that is unsolvable for them. Kids are humbled by tears. And I can tell you the moment in school when I was humbled. It was when I was a senior in high school, and I wasn't ready for trigonometry. The teacher was in the library trying to save me, and he asked me, “What are you doing in this class?” And I wept—not hard or anything, just a little—little tiny Germanic tears. But seriously, I will never forget that moment because what he was saying to me is you can't just dance in here and do whatever you want. This is hard work. Right? That's how you teach humility—by making sure they work hard, and make them do things they're not good at. If they're not good at math—OK, what does that mean, that they're not good at math? Compared to what? Compared to who?—So, then teach them math. Now the way we teach math in our culture needs to be healed. But don't let them not study something because it’s hard for them, and then be surprised when they come out kind of cocky. That's what happens. If life is easy and you never have to meet your limits, then you don't believe you have any.
Interviewer, Presv. Ana Coman: Thank you. Thank you so much!
