A person “unprepared” to do a task may not have done the necessary homework, or may simply be unwilling. But what do we mean when we apply to college students the vague, usually euphemistic term, underprepared? Let’s first recognize that “prepared” itself is often a loaded term. I was one of the millions of Boy Scouts who have sworn always to “be prepared”. The job of the new Homeland Security Department is to help us all “be prepared.” A religious person may view life itself as preparation: “Oh Willy Dh Willy, don’t murder me — I’m not prepared for Eternity!” But what about preparing not for an afterlife but merely for college? In earlier decades, prep schools were supposed to do the job, but only the richest could attend them; almost everyone else could be thought of as under prepared. In colleges today, “underprepared” often means remedial; the word is often employed to explain student failure.
You who have probably known students entering creative writing courses who showed inconsistent ability to write conventional sentences and paragraphs; these and other beginning creative writing students often also demonstrate a daunting lack of familiarity with literature itself. Having read few poems, short stories, novels and plays, they don’t readily notice some of the elements of these works that more experienced readers recognize and savor. As a result, attempts to teach the craft of fiction and poetry writing to second year college students often need to be propped up by extra, crash instruction in how to read poetry, fiction and scripts with care. We the teachers of these students may grumble about the decline of the schools and the nation’s diminishing literacy. We may blame the student or maybe fault our own colleagues, who were supposed to prepare these students last year for further college work.
One tempting curricular remedy is to require college creative writing students to take prerequisite or corequisite literature courses, the more the better. The disadvantage of this approach is that it tends to drive away non-English majors, so that many students of talent will take other paths and never arrive at a creative writing course, one that could have been pivotal in their own artistic development. We want to suggest that rather than relying on restricting the study of creative writing through curricular rules, we should work to introduce the study of literature and deft instruction in basic creative writing earlier, in freshman composition and even developmental English courses, as an integrated activity. If this is done skillfully, it doesn’t cheat students out of necessary skill development, but improves instruction, leading to richer learning-and better preparation for those who go on to enter creative writing courses. —Larry MacKenzie
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007