"What in the world does screenwriting have to do with me passing PAWS and the SAT next year?"It's a good question.
I have a philosophy of teaching that is different from most. What I see going on in most English classrooms is teachers presenting stories to their class and saying, "Lo, here is a perfect story sent to us from on high. Praise it." And then the class needs to write about characterization this, setting that, language the other thing.
So the students are always consumers of literature. The literature is always above them waiting to be worshiped.
I have a different approach. I want to make all of you into producers of literature. I want you to be writers before you become analyzers. I want you to experience, first hand, what it's like to write a creative work. I want you to take it from conception to outline to draft to finished product. Once you have done that, you will know what it's like to be a writer.
As writers yourselves, you can approach literature as a fellow craftsman rather than as a worshiper. You know what it's like to write a story. Thus, you can use your own experience to analyze it. Because you KNOW what it's like to create a story. You've done it.
Instead of assuming that the story in front of you is perfect and needs only praise, you can actually look at the writer's craft and tell what is working and what isn't. And believe me, from time to time, I'm going to give you some lame stories to read. I'll expect you to be able to say, 'This is a lame story," and be able to back up your assertion with good, craft-founded evidence.
It's kind of like me and cars. I barely know how to open the hood of my car. I have only the vaguest notion of what goes on inside the engine. The only way I could tell the difference between a Kia Sephia engine and a Ferrari engine is by what name is printed on it. I can only use engines; I have no idea to how construct them. So if you made me try to analyze engines, I wouldn't get too far. I'd probably just parrot back what the teacher said.
However, if I actually learned to build an engine, if I made one of my own, I'd be able to analyze engines much better. I could tell when one wasn't working. I could tell how powerful an engine was. I'd know better how to fix an engine
That's what we're doing. We're building engines.
