a writer's lair

I have a radical proposal. As I mentioned, the American culture seems to be peculiarly impoverished. So in my vast wisdom (read in the sarcasm), I have specific solutions that may help. Some have said on occasion that it is not the goal of Christians to redeem the culture. Allow me to concur with exception. People are part of the culture. I aim to admonish the people in the culture to not be satisfied with their current state and to challenge our own expectations for ourselves, who are Christians.

Educators

Challenge students by giving yourself challenges. A professor who understands everything on the topic will not understand the student who doesn't understand the basics of the topic.

Give both subjective and objective assignments. Objective will help you make sure that those who are diligent will be rewarded; however, the subjective assignments will force your students to use their creativity. In short, by using both assignments will stretch both you and your students.

Resist the urge to lower the bar and make your own job easier for grading. 60% of your class should not be getting a B on a regular basis. Certainly, a few classes may be exceptional, but the majority of the time the mean, median, and mode should be C because that means average. And there is nothing wrong being average when the average is excellence.

Don't fear a few moments of silence after a question. Don't rephrase unless it was very badly phrased. Don't reiterate. Don't re-prompt an answer. Let the question sit on the brains of those listening for maybe 10 seconds because your brain has the answer, but your students are learning; they don't know the answer necessarily.

Students

Don't take the safe classes that will keep your GPA high. Take some classes that will put your GPA at risk. There is no point in boasting a 4.0 when you went after easy classes. All you proved by that high GPA was that you can game a system.

Don't think the teacher ought to give you a high grade simply because you completed the assignment to all the specifications. Satisfactory is a C. Lacking errors is not a positive, but a lack of a negative. Thus, errors should and do bring down your grade very often. Remember if you're doing your absolute best, then you can't complain if it is judged on par with everyone else. Excellence should be the average, not two standard deviations about the mean (97%).

Resist the mindset that you're paying for this education, so it is your right to get a high grade. You are paying for the privilege of having talented people instruct you and evaluate your grasp of a field. If your grasp is sub par, then your grade should be sub par. If your grasp is good, and you produce results that can be clearly seen, then you're grade will reflect that as well. You never have the right to a grade. But you do have the right to prove yourself for a grade.

Pieces of paper may grant you a pay increase, but education will grant you success. Don't merely go through classes trying to learn what you think may be valuable for your field. Learn everything that everyone is teaching. Evaluate it. Test it against what is true. You will become educated this way instead of informed. Education will train you to become a better human being whereas a knowledge transfer may as well make you a computer.

Writers

Write. Write. Write. Even if you will throw most of it away, keep writing. You are learning excellence by this methodology, putting in the time to a craft that will shape the future world by shaping the future minds.

Wean people away from the concept of genres. Blend them together in such away that Barnes and Noble will have a hard time deciding which shelf it should place your work. Refuse to be reduced to romance or scifi or fantasy merely. Write the excellent novel, not the excellent scifi!

In line with the last thought, don't write for a market. Write for excellence and let the market create itself. I find myself too many times having to think about who would want to buy what I'm writing and how I should slant what I'm writing to that market. Instead find authors who write well, figure out what makes them tick. Then write well yourself. The market will make itself, even if you can only publish them to a blog or by eBook.

Everyone

Words ought not be bought simply for their bulk. So don't simply buy the book that looks thicker. More doesn't always equal merrier. More may just equal filler like cotton candy, some sugar a bunch of air. 

Realize that hard reading equals real learning while light reading means nothing new. If a book is hard to read fast, that may in fact be a good thing because you are encountering things you hadn't thought of before.

Read broadly. Have a favorite type of book for sure, but read beyond that. You may prefer non-fiction. So read some fiction. You may prefer fiction; read some history books. You may prefer blogs; so read some newspapers on occasion. Even listen to audio books that you have read before in order to get a new perspective on them.  Don't let reading habits form you. Form your reading habits.

Buy art, not just movie posters, but real art. Buy something you don't understand in order that you may eventually understand it. When you learn to understand that which you couldn't quite grasp before, you gain something more than knowledge. You gain determination. You can ability to understand a wider variety of expression.

Become a patron of artists. Find artists that express in their art values that are right and support their expression by purchasing that art. Artist need to eat just as much as engineers do, so spend maybe a few dollars less on your new plasma and save some for a local artist.

Every year pick a topic and become an expert in that topic by the end of the year by reading or listening to a book every week. After 52 books on something, you probably know quite a bit about it. 

Lastly, never ever give into the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean its good either. Think beyond the marketing, beyond the media bonanza, beyond wild success because that usually means its a fad. And if you live for the fads, prepare to live for stuff that doesn't last. Build your life on stuff that last.