We do what we must because we can.

I should have known that the writing class wouldn't fly. I hate the idea of on-line education.

The problem is that I was really ready for the sort of thing that threadwalker used to complain about, referencing her own self as perfect example. People go into an art, and people want to do all the crazy cool business, want to break all the rules. But that's not how it works. You do have to master fundamentals and learn the sort of journeyman craft before it makes sense to move on to the next level. So I was ready to be taken down a peg.

Instead, I find myself as the one who's imposing limits on the situation. For instance, I was writing things that always considered the question of stagability. He was the one arguing for flights of fancy. Now, I can see why in that sense of "just let your mind freeeeeeeeee" logic, but that's the exact opposite of what works well. You set your mind free after accomplishing mastery.

It was not that the e-mails read as if no one was paying attention to what I was writing. Instead, it felt like someone was paying a half-hearted attention, like those times I'd get a response to a Craig's List ad that read as carefully cut and paste into a generic template in a sort of regurgitated mad-libs situation. There were too many paragraphs that only loosely applied.

So many of the suggestions were horrible. Not bad, but horrible. I do a fair bit of editing of work, both fiction and non, so here's the fallen_scholar guide to editing:

GOOD: The analogy about the starfish is a bit weak. It doesn't keep up with the serious nature of the rest of the paragraph. Maybe there's a way to change its tone, while still keeping the ick-worthy ideas?

BAD: Change "like a starfish" to "like an important starfish, he knew where his arms were." [i.e. let me rewrite your passage for you]

HORRIBLE: The analogy about the starfish is okay, but starfish aren't a great fish. I knew someone. He wrote an analogy with squirrels. That was awesome, because he used squirrels. Squirrels collect nuts for the winter.

You're no earthly idea how common this is. Not someone giving bad advice because he can't give good advice. Someone giving advice on a total disconnect. One interpretation is that the thing you're doing is so bad, the other person can't even manage a proper complaint about it. The other is that the other person really can't figure out what to do. That some of the comments were rank amateur stuff - not what he was telling me to do, which I'd have no trouble accepting, but what he was suggesting as good, didn't sit well either.

But maybe it's me. Maybe I'm unteachable now. I felt this way in law school, dealing with a variety of professors who clearly had no sense of what an educational praxsis was. Am I just insufferable because I think I could teach Property better than my professors? No, it's because I like this thing known as teaching, and I've given in consideration. Then again, the moment I write that, I remember that some of the professors I knew who'd given the matter consideration had some of the most fucked up teaching styles.

I'd almost combine those two, and say that academics always was my calling, and that the best thing for me to do would be to try and work back up to it. Maybe even work back up to it through some alternate route, a sort of scholarship through the gutters of actually doing Aristophanes out somewhere. But really, that's just compensating. That's a pipe dream, based on the fact that I couldn't cut it as an actual academic trying to get a degree, so maybe I could cut it being a rebel academic. It doesn't work for the exact reason I already cited earlier, that it's always - always - about laying the groundwork and then doing something interesting. And whether I don't have the patience or don't have the humility or just so simply missed my window of opportunity, I don't know and it really doesn't matter.

All of that, however, doesn't matter, because the act of dropping out brings up a whole other array.