Teacher's Pet

You have a class of creative writing students, some of them loaded with natural talent turn in beautifully written work, another struggles with his basic grammar but clearly has something to say.

Who deserves the teachers help the most?

And who succeeds in the end?

Ayse Papatya Bucak assistant professor of English at Florida Atlantic University talks about the student he hardly knew, Ishmael Beah (left), whose heartbreaking memoir A Long Way Gone is in all the bookstores now and very well worth reading.

He writes more about teaching Beah on his blog:

But what the memoir made me think about was naturally the workshop in which I knew Ishmael. The writing he was doing then (fiction, drama and poetry) was all grounded in his real experiences (though not the worst of them) and fortunately I had a class that recognized that in workshopping this kind of autobiographical material it was important to be sensitive. At the time, his writing was still full of ESL mistakes and honestly a little rough. But while we talked some about those things, the focus was always on the material--what we thought he could do with the material. And I'm glad of that because we had no idea really the extent of the horror of Ishmael's past. There was no way for us to know that by the time he was fifteen he was a trained military killer and that by the time he was eighteen he was addressing the UN about child soldiers. This was a good reminder to me that while I think I know my students, I really know very little of what their lives are like outside of the classroom, and that I shouldn't assume that I do. I don't think anything would have stopped Ishmael from writing his story, but I'm glad to say that our class was a voice of encouragement, expressing that we wanted to hear more.

Many thanks Jen for forwarding the link.