Specific actionable bit: "... as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary ... write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. ... use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember."
tl;dr "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron"
Edit: one exercise from soviet education (no idea if this is still done in modern russia) I'd think worth stealing is that the teacher would pick a selection of famous lines out of a poem, and ask the class to write their own verses around one of them.
If I remember the story correctly, the chorus to Leningrad's "In [St.] Peter[sburg] we booze" was inspired by a line "Peter — endure, endure" from a classical russian poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc
I found that it works great in programming too: take a very beautifully crafted code, remove some bits, and ask the students to fill in the blanks, or wrap something around it.
The students then gain many things out of it:
- they practice reading someone else code
- they have to understand a problem to solve from context
- they get to craft a solution to that problem
- they don't have to start "from scratch", which is easy to do for simple problems, but hard as soon has you dwelve into advanced concepts
Above all, like the soviet education exercice, one untold benefit is that they get to see the beautiful code itself. It's not only inspiring and driving their efforts, it builds taste.
Comments
Specific actionable bit: "... as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. ... avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary ... write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. ... use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember."
tl;dr "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron"
Edit: one exercise from soviet education (no idea if this is still done in modern russia) I'd think worth stealing is that the teacher would pick a selection of famous lines out of a poem, and ask the class to write their own verses around one of them.
If I remember the story correctly, the chorus to Leningrad's "In [St.] Peter[sburg] we booze" was inspired by a line "Peter — endure, endure" from a classical russian poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc
This is a great exercice.
I found that it works great in programming too: take a very beautifully crafted code, remove some bits, and ask the students to fill in the blanks, or wrap something around it.
The students then gain many things out of it:
- they practice reading someone else code
- they have to understand a problem to solve from context
- they get to craft a solution to that problem
- they don't have to start "from scratch", which is easy to do for simple problems, but hard as soon has you dwelve into advanced concepts
Above all, like the soviet education exercice, one untold benefit is that they get to see the beautiful code itself. It's not only inspiring and driving their efforts, it builds taste.