72: Benjamin Lyda - How and why we teach students to love writing.

Join James as he sits down with Benjamin Lyda from Scriptorium Writing to discuss writing within a classical and liberal arts framework. They discuss both the how and why of teaching writing and argue that writing is not just a technique, but an art that humanises the writer.

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Music: 'Inspiring Dreams' by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome back to another episode of Educating Humans. I'm your host, James, and today we are joined by Benjamin Leiter from Scriptorium Writing. He's all the way over in America. And he's been very generous to come and join us on uh online to have a talk about writing, uh, what what writing really means within a humane or human education uh and the place that it should should really take in all people's lives because it's a worthwhile thing. So, Ben, thanks for joining.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Uh thank you so much for having me. Uh yeah, it's it's an honor to to be with you this this morning on your program.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Uh so let's just jump into the the key discussion. I was thinking that we could talk about uh really the how and why of teaching students to write well. Uh and to love writing well. I think it's a it's an important thing that not only should students be able to do these good things, but they should love it. Um so you've created a program called Scriptorium Writing, um, and it's an approach to teaching to write. So I thought, who better to ask than yourself? What what do you think when you hear that question? Um let's start with the why side of it. Why should we teach students to love writing well?

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Yeah, I mean, why should we teach them to love anything, right? Um there's a there's a point of entry into this conversation that probably ought to be addressed uh regarding uh artificial intelligence. I mean, it's something that we can't ignore. It's out there, and it's amazing what AI can produce now in terms of writing. Uh if a uh computer can spit out essays that write better than we can, uh a larger question is, well, what is it about writing that's actually human? Uh what aspects of writing actually helps us become humanized and not uh part of some sort of machine, right? So this has been a big question for me a lot lately. Uh my question has been, okay then, if AI can simulate so many kind of functions of the brain in education, it's not just that we don't want our students using AI, but there's a larger question about, well, what is it about these things that is human? Um and so um I'm starting to look at this this question from kind of the perspective of two extremes, right? So, first of all, I'm looking at this sort of extreme idea that uh AI can mimic human brain functions, right? And spit out these beautiful essays. We'll say beautiful loosely. And then on the other extreme, uh we have the animal, right? Something that uh we also sometimes are tempted to emulate as human beings. Well, if you know if we are like animals, we function like animals, and there's only experience. Um but I think the reality is that we're actually the bridge between these two things, uh between the sort of intellect and the body, between the kind of you know, invisible spiritual aspects of thought and then the kind of corporal experience of being human occupying a body on this planet. So those are the two extremes that we're between, that we actually are the bridge between these two extremes. So if we think of writing as simply a sort of uh uh, you know, something that's just only an intellectual activity that can be manipulated through sophistry and now through these sort of like technological machines that can do it for us, right, then we're missing out on the corporal part of writing, the physical part of writing, right? But then if we if we think about writing as unnecessary, as right, uh our animal uh kind of uh instincts are what's gonna drive us to succeed, and writing's only useful insofar as it helps us get what we want, right, uh, then that also is kind of falling short of what we're looking for. Um really the the way that we bridge these two extremes uh is through the the chest, as Halcyus Lewis would put it. Um I usually use the word the heart. Uh the heart is this place where um our desires and our affections are nurtured, uh where we learn to draw our corporal kind of physical selves in a direction that is meaningful, right? Um let me put it another way. Another way to look at it is um ritual, or you might use the word liturgy, is the thing that is most human. Because a computer, AI, artificial intelligence, will never, ever, no matter how smart it gets, will never need to eat. It will never need to share in a meal, which is the most communal, liturgical, ritualistic, whatever term you want to use, thing that a human can do is sitting together at a meal and eating, right? Uh in a way that is ceremonial or ritualistic, right? So I've had this beautiful opportunity to enjoy uh some some company of folks who are trying to really get down to the most ceremonial aspects of the meal, right? Um and they have kind of some of them have been to the country of Georgia. Some of them are uh bringing these ideas from the country of Georgia into our own American spaces and trying to emulate the way that they actually have these meals, right? Um these meals are ceremonial because not only is it a gathering of people to eat, but it's a gathering of people to give speeches or toasts. In fact, the whole meal uh revolves around a series of, I think, I don't remember, nine to twelve toasts, all on a different theme, beginning with the theme of God, uh the Virgin Mary, the apostles, earth, uh the creation, maleness, femaleness, all the way down. There's a series of these speeches where we stand at the meal communally and we take a drink and we sing a song with each of these speeches, and we engage in these ideas, and we are now in the very, very action of combining that which is invisible and spiritual, ideas, right? Meaning with the corporal, because we're feasting together, we're eating together. So, why is it important to write? Why is it important to love to write is a better question. Like you at this question you started with, right? Because it's in loving that we actually are able to bridge that gap between those two extremes. It's in uh nurturing the affections of our children and our students, right? To get them to love those things that make us truly human, uh, where we are going to actually see um something um worth our time, right? So, why do I bring up the feasts and the toasting and how is that related to writing? Well, it has everything to do with it. You know, writing is a wonderful laboratory where we get to play with words, uh, especially with young students. We get to teach them how to play with language, we get to teach them how you can uh use language in such a way that you can be surprising, that you could tug on art strings, uh, I mean the heart strings. And I love to tell students, I said, you know, the invention of the sentence, the written sentence, is one of the most amazing inventions in the history of human history uh because it's through these little squiggles, like ink on paper, that we can actually change hearts, that we can motivate people, that we can make them cry, we can make them laugh, that we can uh, you know, help them muster up and and uh you know marshal themselves to do whatever it is that they have to do. Um writing is so human because it's the bridge between uh ideas, right, and our corporal experience. So it's really important when we're actually training students to write, what we don't do is that we put their writing through a machine degraded, number one. That's that's gonna kill the whole thing, the whole scenario I've just set up. Another thing that's gonna kill the process is if we um teach children that they're writing to get a grade, right? That they start learning to write for their teacher. This is also a killing thing. Uh it's it's a way that we assess and we kill with our assessment. Uh, but there's a better way that we can actually nurture the love of writing in our students, and that is to let writing be serve the purpose it's supposed to serve, which is communal. And so when I'm teaching classes of writing, I actually, after a writing assignment, my students stand up and they they read their work to each other, right? So that their writing becomes very meaningful because it's corporate, because it's synergistic, because every student is going to learn that, hey, listen to that voice. It's so different than mine. Listen to the way they took that question, it's different than mine. Um, these are so many things that AI can never do for us. They can never, ever, ever create that communal, uh ritualistic action of reading together, right? They can, it can never uh become our own voice. And so if students don't have that opportunity to experiment with their own writing, with their own words, um, they're never gonna be able to develop that voice, and they're never gonna understand how this human connection uh or this human uh experience of connection through writing should actually be working. So there's there's sort of a kind of a bridge kind of opening to that question.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

I love that. Um Yeah, I love I love the inclusion of Lewis and and the idea of the trousered ape or the uh uh urban blockhead, you know, men without chests, are we appealing to their appetites or to their head? But really, and as you've said, writing is such a human aspect, it's such a human endeavour. And so when we don't teach it in a way that is communal, then we are cutting off some part of humanity because we are made for community, you know, made in the image of God and the God is a communal triune one. And so it would only make sense that our our endeavors in the English or the writing classroom uh are for the sake of shared community. So this learning I love that, because it also forces then, really, if you're thinking about it. Um when you can't write for the community if you don't have time to read aloud and digest and think about what others have said. And so then what it forces you to do is slow down the pace a lot. Because it's not just about each individual getting that task done on whatever your in um plan is, but it's actually about the class together being able to hear each other's voices and to respond. And so there just just by nature of that, you need to have far more time. Which is a good thing, because it forces you then to slow down and to remove a lot of the stuff that maybe you're rushing through. I f I feel like it's the same, it's the same in English teaching when you're reading a book. You can read a book quite quickly, you know. But to read a book and discuss a book as a group, well that takes far longer. And so if you've got say the a s the unit plan for the term is we're gonna read this book, and it's a book uh that is it's gonna take, you know, too long to be able to read it in class. You have to make these choices about well, what do you prioritize? Do you prioritize reading it aloud and making sure that you all get a communal good reading of this book? Do you Do you do a blend of that and getting them to do some reading at home so that you can then have conversation in class? Um, I just think the cool the good thing about any time you're trying to make learning more human and more communal is that it forces you to sequence and structure in a way that is really purposeful. Because you want to make sure you're getting in all the different good things that you can and making room for it. Uh which instantly forces the unit plan to uh slow down and maybe reduce what it's trying to get through. So I don't know if there's a connection between what I've just said there and and scriptorium, but I'm presuming there is given that you've led us here with the idea of community. So just um I'd love to hear, because so many different people have different approaches, and they're probably in a school, if they're a teach English teacher listening to this, they're in a school that has a writing program of some kind, or maybe it doesn't even have a formal writing program, it just has a we teach them this at this point, this at this point, this and this point, and oftentimes that's dictated by whatever the assessment that they're being marked on is. Um or you've got people listening that are homeschoolers and they they probably have some sort of program that they've got. Um I'd love to hear from you about how it is that you approach teaching writing in your in your work. How it is that you go about making it a a humane endeavor.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Yeah. Uh yeah, thank you so much. And I I appreciate that kind of re-emphasis on the the communion, uh the kind of communal aspects of writing, right? Um right. So let's talk about then um how that we can actually approach, let's get a little more logistical. How do we approach writing in such a way that's uh much more human? So let's talk about a conventional approach, right? As a contrast, there's a conventional approach to writing uh that tends to be very kind of logarithmic, right? There's sort of point A, point B, point C, right? You fill in the blank. Uh in the most conventional approaches, you might have heard of the five-paragraph essay, which is very common, where it's a sort of a training wheels to writing where we give an introduction, we have three body paragraphs and a conclusion. Uh, people start teaching this as young as uh what we call in the United States anyway, we call it middle school, around sixth, seventh grade, uh sometimes even younger. So 11 and 12 year olds are learning this kind of really strict five-paragraph essay. Uh, and then when we look at this five-paragraph essay, if you were trying to teach this, for example, at a school, at a homeschool co-op with your own child at home, uh, you're gonna start with that paragraph. You say, okay, honey, we're gonna write, we're gonna learn how to write a paragraph today. And a paragraph has a topic sentence. The topic sentence is a statement of the idea of the paragraph. And then you need to support it with evidence. So we'll put in a quotation for something we're reading, and uh, you know, maybe we'll even teach about MLA or or some sort of citation system. And then after that, we're gonna go ahead and write three sentences of commentary because we're gonna have a five-sentence paragraph in our five-paragraph essay. This is a very conventional approach to writing, but if you've if I'm talking to an 11-year-old, everything I've said is just absolutely abstract. The idea of a topic, of evidence, and commentary are things that are very difficult to explain. And so, what tends to happen, even if you're teaching this in a high school level, because high school students struggle with this concept as well, uh is we tend to break things down into smaller and smaller bits. And I I've seen systems where the students write one sentence uh in a box, and then they'll write another sentence in another box, and then another couple of sentences in another box. And surely most teachers don't even know what commentary is, but we say, Oh, I kind of know commentary when I see it. Or maybe a teacher will say, Well, in order to uh comment on uh your topic sentence, you have to have this evidence and you need to elaborate, which is another word that's very abstract and difficult for a student to grapple with, right? So there's a couple of problems with this system. One is that it's it's putting a structure together before any ideas have been created. So instead of having an idea and looking for a structure or a form that fits, we're saying, okay, you've got to write in this structure. It doesn't matter what the topic is, this structure works for every single possibility, which is silly. And I've taught plenty of children who are, you know, 13 and 14 years old, and they'll tell you, they'll say to me, even younger, they'll say to me, Oh, that other writing curriculum, they told me I had to write eight sentences. And I I didn't have eight sentences of ideas, and I had to stretch out my idea over eight sentences, and it becomes really wordy, and you're you're not writing well. Or I've had them say, you know, I had to uh I had to write uh eight sentences, and I I could have written a lot more. I have so much more to say than eight sentences, so I had to cram everything into those eight sentences. So these conventional approaches uh are very machine-like, right? We're starting with a machine, we're starting with a structure and asking students to plug things in. So it's almost more like painting by number than it is actually authentic creation, right? So, how do we get away from that? Okay, with a little digging, I'm sure you know all about this, James, is there's the five canons of rhetoric in the ancient classical world. And the five canons of rhetoric include invention, arrangement, style, memory, and elocution. Now, memory and elocution are particularly for uh public speaking. So we're gonna lay those aside for now and just look at the first three invention, arrangement, and style. Well, what we start to recognize is that most conventional approaches to writing are only teaching arrangement and style. They teach an outline, they teach a form, and maybe they teach some style with similes or metaphors and things like that. Probably one reason we do this is because it's very easy to grade. It's very easy to check a box as a teacher or whoever's doing the assessment to say, okay, I they got an introduction sentence, they they've got five paragraphs, they've kind of done what they were supposed to do. It's it's easy to check, right? But it's not authentic writing. So this is where the Projuma's Mata enters in, right? And this is where going back to the whole point about communion that you said, James, communion takes time, right? So if we're gonna do something worth our time, let's take the time to do it in a worthy way. So the Projuma's Mata is 14 exercises, and these 14 exercises are uh literally training steps on uh for a student on their road to formal rhetoric. It's essentially what all classical uh students, I would say uh even into the 1800s, you see evidence of people learning the Protamus Mata. Um, you could read essays by Montaigne, uh, for an example, uh, and uh you could see evidence of the Projomis Mata. You could see him using proverb, anecdote, narrative, description, all these topics of invention in his writing. So everybody is learning to write this way. This is the foundations of all formal rhetoric, and we've somehow forgotten about it, it's gotten lost, and uh so we're struggling to teach students how to write. These 14 exercises teach topics of invention. In other words, they actually teach that first uh uh uh the first step of rhetoric, which is invention. Right? When we are inventing something, we're taking an inventory of what we already know. And we do this with these topics. So if I have a student and the student comes to me and says, or rather, I if I go to the student and I say, Um, I want you to write on this proverb, consider the anti-sluggard, right? This is a common proverb to teach diligence or perseverance. And so the student says, let's say the student is, you know, 12 years old, 11 years old. And the student says, Okay, so I'm supposed to write about perseverance because that's what the proverb's about. And you're like, Yeah, okay. In the conventional approach, we'll say, Okay, first you have to do uh three body paragraphs. Um, you need to have three points, three points about uh perseverance. What about perseverance we want to say? I mean, that question doesn't even register with an 11-year-old. It's way too abstract. Instead, what I'll say to a student of that age is I'll say, Okay, perseverance is what we're writing about. Can you define perseverance? And an 11-year-old will say, Yes, I can define that. Can you narrate a story about perseverance? And the 11-year-old shakes her head and she says, Yeah, I can do that. And then you ask, can you tell an analogy? What is perseverance like? Can you compare it with something that is not perseverance? In other words, the opposite. All the things that I ask the student to write about, they can do it. They can define, they can narrate, they can describe, they can give analogies, and I'm giving every paragraph a job. Uh, and this becomes so intuitive to the student, it becomes very simple to implement in a classroom, and it's the basis of my curriculum, scriptorium writing, uh, which is using the Protumus Mata to teach children how to create content. Because ultimately, that's the that's the that's the kind of the biggest problem. I've taught, uh I've taught students from fourth grade all the way up through twelfth grade in our United States system. And in that system, uh every single age group still struggles with content creation. Of course, there's some exceptional children who don't. But generally, if I only teach outline and if I teach it step by step by step, they can say, I understand your outline, but I don't know what to write. And you'll hear that again and again. But what do I write? What do I write? What do I write? Okay, yeah, I got it. Introduction, paragraph, but what do I write? Body paragraph, got it. What do I write? It doesn't answer the question. But if I say, okay, here's what you write. Can you narrate a story? Can you describe something? Can you give an analogy? Can you define something? Yes, the student knows what they should write. And this is why they actually start to, going back to our first topic, why they start to love writing. They start to love it because it's intuitive, because they recognize it, because they recognize it as their own, and because it's simple to implement. These are things we do naturally, right? Children describe things, they tell stories, they they talk about the opposite. This is just a way that we can present it to them in an educational context where they're gonna apply that to their writing. And so this is the first step for them to love. Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

That's really good. I'm hoping that that listeners will be recalling the conversation we had with uh Scott Krider, who wrote The Office of Assertion, um a great book uh for university level students learning classical rhetoric and how to app how to uh apply that to the argumentative essay. And he he he speaks so brilliantly about it. But we we did, you know, only such a short amount of time to be able to talk about such a big topic, um, and we talked about this idea of invention, but we never really got into the into the real specifics of it, and so I'm hopeful that that is um that listeners are going, ooh, I'm I'm piecing together different strands here that all all connect, or I'm um, you know, the the pictures all starting to come come clear. Um so that's helpful when when you're talking particularly about that middle middle school, you know, that year six and seven area where you're trying to get these students to start engaging uh with the ability to communicate ideas that are maybe more complex, but how do you really get them there if they can't they you know, how do you teach them to speak if they have nothing to say? And so it's a really good thing you've done. You're giving them a way to figure out what they want to say. Um that's helpful. What then when it comes to maybe the the high school ages, you know, that that 10 through 12 in particular, what's your focus then become? Because by this point you're expecting that they're able to do this this process of thinking of things, and they they'd continue to do that. But how does this develop?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Yeah, Scott Kreider's book, uh, The Office of Assertion, that's a that's a really wonderful book. Um, and it's laid out very clearly, and as you said, it's a great tool. He created it to help those seniors in high school to be ready for college writing. Uh, and in his section on invention, he mostly focuses on syllogisms. So that's fantastic, but it it actually is not something that you'd want to apply at those lower levels, right? This is where these other topics come in handy, which are going to be appropriate for children. So, what about in between, all right? Those kind of like you said, 9th, 10th, 11th grade, you know, 12th grade years, when you're not college student, but you're not a child anymore. So this is where I would introduce those uh common topics, uh, but I'd make them a bit more technical. Um there's a there's a sheet. Uh I could probab I should probably get this uh as a PDF on my website or something like that. Um and it's called the the Aristotle's Five Common Topics, but they're broken down into these various writing stems. And so when you look at the topic of definition, um there's about 12 different ways to write definition. And I've actually used this kind of activity uh with high school students just so they can see how much they can say about one thing. We're not talking about dictionary definitions, but we're talking about ways that they can define things in language that's plain. So this would not be what I would consider authentic writing, but it's a great training tool to help them understand how much can be said just on definition alone. For an example, it'll say something like X is like Y because X is not like Y because. X used to mean this, but now it means that. The etymology of X comes from the Greek word, which means no, whatever it means. And so they go through this sort of list of sort of uh sentence stems uh so that they can really, really explore a definition. You do the same thing with uh opposite and relationship and circumstance through these activities. So we're still using topics, we're still teaching them invention, uh, we're just doing it in a way that's a lot more technical, so that they can uh, well, it's an appropriate age for them to be more technical as they're kind of looking at uh more complex things uh at a high school level. So the the topics of invention don't go away. Um they're still also gonna be able to narrate their points. Uh they're still gonna be able to um define things, they'll still be able to show the opposite, but we're gonna give them some tools so that they can get a little bit more precise in the way they approach these things. So that's the first thing that I would do with high school. Um also, in terms of like growing in love for these things, um, authentic writing has to come from an authentic idea. And uh, you know, high school students they don't have a lot to say because they don't have a lot of life experience. Well, and and this kind of should go without saying, but this is why it's really important that we pick the kinds of books that are gonna engage their mind so they actually have something to talk about. Because lacking life experience, they're just not gonna have a lot to say relative to somebody who's you know my age and and lives some life. So uh uh we give them really great books. Um, but I would add also that we don't only give them the great books. But sometimes those great books that have been so popular in classical schools, they're not even quite ready for those yet. So uh it'd be wonderful if high school students would spend more time with, say, Dickens, uh, maybe with uh Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, things like that. They're not maybe the great, great books, they're not like Dostoevsky, it's not necessarily the Iliad, um, but but they're they're the kind of books that ready their hearts for that more complex writing. I'm sorry, reading. But these are uh Dickens especially, right? Dickens, he has these characters, they're very relatable, um, they're very engaging, and there's so much to say about them, right? So if we're choosing the right books, um this is going to add to their um interest in writing because they will have something to say about it. Um and so, first, in the classroom at least, we're gonna give them the right books, they're gonna be spending time with it, they're gonna have a class discussions, and I always prefer that uh high school students have a rich classroom discussion prior to them uh putting ink on paper. And it also builds that communal aspect of the writing too, because it's they're writing about something that they've already talked about, right, in class.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

I'm sure another question people are thinking about when they're thinking about writing instruction, because this is all very helpful, um one of the things I'm sure people want to know is length. What is an appropriate length to provide? And I know this is it's almost a dumb question, because that should be determined by the task as opposed to the other way around. But if we indulge it for a moment, because it is it is an earnest one, what what sort of length should students be writing to when it comes to their um both you know, summative and formative assessment? Just the stuff we want to see and then the stuff we want to grade. What what length should we get them writing to?

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up a formative and summative assessment uh with writing instruction. That's really essential to understand the distinction. So I'm gonna kind of answer your question in a very roundabout way. Um short answer is uh, well, here's the short answer, and then I'll do the roundabout answer. The short answer is this I was teaching freshmen at a classical school, and they I assign a lesson, a writing assignment, I mean, and uh the students say, Well, how many paragraphs do you want? And my response was, Well, how many ideas do you have? You have as many paragraphs as you have ideas. Um, that's the answer. That's the short answer. Um, the longer answer, uh, I think it's uh it's important to understand the difference between formative and summative. Okay. Formative is formative. It their students are still being formed, they're still practicing, they're still learning. It's the rehearsal before the big play, right? And we can't, we can't, we wouldn't want to be an audience in a rehearsal for a play, right? They're still forming what it's going to be. Summative is when we actually can uh provide assessment. So after they've done their rehearsals, after they've practiced, after they've been allowed to make mistakes, then we're gonna correct them and we're gonna help them grow. And then finally, with their final uh draft, then we can finally give a sort of assessment. Okay. So I like to have lots of formative assessment in writing. In other words, short uh written papers that might be practicing, for an example, definition, or maybe they're practicing in and this is great. You could read something like um um Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and ask a very simple question. Okay, what is success? And then they can spend a short formative paper on just writing about success with the topic of definition, and they're gonna write that definition in about you know, uh 19 different ways, 15, 19 different ways. Success is this, it's not this. Success used to mean this, and now it means this. One time C.S. Lewis said success is this, and so it again it's not an essay in itself, but it's helping them develop content. So that's formative. You're gonna have some other essays along the way uh that are gonna be shorter. Uh, formative is an opportunity for them to practice, it's an opportunity for them to make mistakes, uh, but also it's something that they can still share with your peers, it's keeping it meaningful. Then I don't know, if you're in a formal classroom, a traditional school with semesters, I don't know whether you have trimesters or semesters, but say a semester is about uh, you know, usually September through December in our in the United States. Um, and uh during that semester, maybe halfway through the semester, you tell them of all of those formative assessments, those short writing assignments, I want you to pick your favorite one, and now I want you to give it to me, and I'm going to now really give you a lot of feedback. Okay? I'm gonna give you descriptive feedback. I'm gonna describe what I see, both good and bad, and give some suggestions for you to make improvement. And then the student is given that opportunity to rewrite that paper and kind of grow it, uh, make it the best they can. And then they're gonna turn that in, and then we have an opportunity to have a final say on their assessment, a final word. Um grading is a whole nother question, uh, which I find really fascinating, um, because we don't talk about assessment enough in schools, in school circles. Uh, we just assume that assessing in the conventional way is always the best thing. But um, if I uh ask a student to give me a paper and I ask them to revise and edit, and they do everything I ask, even though I know other students have better papers than this student, but they've done everything I've asked successfully. I mean, to me that sounds like an A. To me, that sounds like they've achieved success for that student. Because writing ultimately is a very individualized sport, so to speak, right? Um, and it's very, very difficult to judge based on an abstract benchmark of where every student is developing their voice and their ideas where they're at. Um, so the only way that this happens is um not through checking checklists. Again, I'm not I don't like these checklists, right? Maybe one student is actually fantastic at organizing their ideas, but their vocabulary and their syntax is weak. There's another student who has a beautiful way of using language, but they don't know how to organize it. How do I compare those? How do I make one an A and one a B? It's almost impossible. So a wise teacher knows how to take those essays. They know how to focus on, okay, this student right here, they've got it organized, but they need to learn how to enhance their language to make it beautiful. I'm gonna give them two or three tips on how to make their language more beautiful, to avoid wordy sentences, to avoid run-ons, and show them how to maybe add some descriptors, some, maybe, maybe some introductory, uh, you know, some introductory dependent clauses just for some complexity of sentence structure. I'm gonna show them how to do that, and I'm not gonna worry about organization. Meanwhile, another student who's doing a very, very great job with language, they have some organizational problems, and you simply take that paper and say, let me show you how you can reorder this paper to make it more structured so that there's a more logical flow. And then you don't need to touch, um, you don't need to touch them on the area of style and and vocabulary, et cetera. So when those two students are doing very, very different things and they're both growing and they're both showing success, uh, I mean, I would give them both A's, even though they have very, very different styles and they're working on something very, very different. So I don't know if this is this is getting into the nitty-gritty, and I'm not sure if that's exactly where you want to go with all this. Um, but uh I I don't even know if I'm answering your question anymore. But uh in terms of formative and summative, that's where that's coming from. We just have to make sure that when they're writing, we allow them papers where they're allowed to make stakes, mistakes, and and they don't have to always be corrected for every single little thing they do wrong. I had a student who, in uh he was about seventh grade, about 12 years old, and uh he was a fine writer. It was nothing wrong with his writing, but he couldn't spell. Uh he had a serious disability in spelling, and he misspelled five words in one line. And I used to correct every single one. And he was very dutiful, and he would actually correct every single word, and he was spending so much time correcting his spelling that he wasn't growing in other ways as a writer. So I finally decided, you know what? Let's just let him learn how to spell said, S-A-I-D. That's just a common word he knows how to needs to know how to spell. And let's focus on the part of his writing that's gonna make the biggest impact on his growth as a writer. So that's why it's really important to make those distinctions between formative and summative. So we let alone things that can be let alone, let them make mistakes, let them explore, let them be creative, let them try something that's risky. Um there's those students who they'll do everything exactly perfect, but it's the most risk-free writing, and it's as dry as dry as chalk. Um, so we want them to feel like they can take risks, so they have to have some formative assessments they aren't know are not going to get graded. Something that they're just gonna share in the community. Again, going back again to the most important thing of this talk, which is so that they learn to love writing. Because if they don't love it, if they don't care, then everything that we're talking about is absolutely useless. It's only the student who loves and cares about writing who is going to grow. And so it's important for us to be able to touch those strings and harmonize them with what's important in the most sensitive way.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

I love that. That's so good. I think you've been very generous with your uh your time and with your your knowledge. Um, if people wanted to learn more about this kind of approach that you're putting forward, where should they go? What's on offer for them?

SPEAKER_00 36:54

Uh you can go find out about scriptorium writing at scriptoriumwriting.com. Uh, it tells a lot about uh the work there. There's some videos as well, and I go in more detail about this approach to writing. Um, also you can find me at livingclassical.org, um, and I'm moving some of the curriculum onto that page as well as um I have uh a consulting organization there as well. So those are two of the best ways that you can find me. I also have a Substack at Living Classical.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Great. And you're coming to Australia uh this year for the St. John of Kronstadt conference, is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Yeah, that's so, so exciting. I'm so excited. Uh I never thought in my life I'd have the chance to come to Australia, but yeah, I'll be there in July at St. Kronstadt. Um, so I'm very much excited. Uh very, very excited about that trip.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Beautiful. Well, if anyone wants to get in touch, I'm sure they'll they'll have those avenues, they'll find out uh more. But I appreciate the time. I appreciate looking at writing because it is such an integral thing, and it's you know, it's not just a an English thing. Uh writing is in all all subjects. Um it's something that I think people need to have a more comprehensive and clear idea of what good writing looks like and how we teach students to do it, so that they can enjoy it, so that they can love it. Because also, they will use it, right? They will use it in their whole they're gonna have to like I always say this to the boy students, and always get some blushing. And I say, There's gonna be a time when you're gonna want to write a love letter. And if you don't know how to use words, your love letter's gonna stink and she's gonna say no. Uh but seriously, there's or I or I'll say this, there's gonna be a time when you're a parent and you've got a teenager and you need to get to convince them to come back to your side of things, you know, when you wanna when you wanna be able to convince them of something. I'm like, I'm not talking about convincing people that you think that the Animal Farm characters had this mistake or this fatal flaw. I mean, you're gonna take you're gonna be trying to deal with someone human and to get them to your side. And to do that, you need to know how to communicate yourself persuasively, artfully, truthfully, and these are all the things that we teach in writing. Uh and so I hope this has been a helpful episode for people to see kind of one of the ways in which we can do this. We can approach it in a way that is humane, um, but also maybe recogni recognizing that these approaches need to be purposeful, and if you're gonna prioritize writing, then it might mean that some other things don't get touched on as well, you know, because we live in a in a system where, well, we get seven days a week and we're not spending all of those teaching writing, right? Uh there's many things to do, and so we need to figure out how to prioritize those. But I think writing is a very important thing and well worth our time to prioritize it, because it will make everything else flourish, because it will make us more human and better communicators. So thank you, Ben. I appreciate the conversation today. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Uh it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for talking with me.