Tag: teaching

The Do-It-Yourself Method

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I wrote briefly about the just-you-and-the-Norton-Anthology method of bringing yourself up to speed on the English or American literary canon.

There is not, alas, a Norton Anthology of Science Fiction that can serve a similar purpose. There’s The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but it’s much more limited in scope, containing only American and Canadian short fiction from 1960 to 1990 (the anthology came out in 1993.)

John Klima, in his Tor.com essay The Ten Most Influential Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthologies/Anthology Series, provides a list of books which, taken all together, can give you a sense of what was considered important or groundbreaking in the field at different times.  The downside is that you’ll need to buy or borrow a stack of books instead of just one.  (I know, I know . . . the thought makes you weep hot tears.)

But if what you’re looking for is a single Big Fat Volume that you can read from cover to cover in lieu of a full-dress classroom experience, then you might want to give this anthology a look:  Sense of Wonder, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman.  It covers science fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present, and includes essays as well as fiction.  (Full disclosure:  I have an essay in this anthology, and my husband/coauthor and I have a short story in it as well.)

A Sad Fact

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Years ago, for my sins, I was a grad student teaching freshman composition† at a large university. One day, I was cornered after class by a student to whom I had given a B+ on her most recent essay. She wanted to know why, if I hadn’t marked off any errors on the essay, I hadn’t given it an A. I explained that as far as I was concerned, an essay required something more than just technical proficiency to lift it out of the “B” range and up to an “A”.

A stricken expression came over her face. “You mean I have to be interesting, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid you do.”

Needless to say, for fiction writing at the publishable level, this truth is not just doubled, it’s squared.  Maybe even cubed.

†I forget exactly what they were calling the freshman English writing class that year — Introduction to Rhetoric, it may have been. The name of the course changes from year to year and school to school, but when you lift up the hood and look at what’s inside, it’s still freshman composition underneath.