soloset said:
Wouldn't it be better to help the child learn to write better, in the long run?
Yep. And I know several adults who need to learn to write better, too.
Unfortunately, schools in my state—thanks to the Standards of Learning—are teaching kids to write badly. Kids who don't follow the formula for writing essays do poorly in class and on the SOL tests.
When I began my writing-in-residency, many teachers asked for writing help for their students. What they wanted me to do was strip creativity from their students, have them conform to the formula, and have them use lots of adjectives and adverbs for description. (What is an "embedded adjective" any way? Kids are expected to have them in their essays, but none of the teachers I asked could tell me what it is.)
Kids who began their essays with an interesting hook were penalized. Fortunately the creative writing students i worked with knew they had to write badly to do well on the SOLs and could shift gears accordingly. (I love what one girl said: "If you tell everything your essay is about in the first sentence of your introduction, why bother to write the rest of the essay?")
Many elementary teachers in my area (I work with high schoolers) have their students enter the American Literary (or is it Literacy?) Council contest, which means parents are buying over-priced books to see their kids' work in print.
As for using Lulu for class projects, many teachers* (and parents) don't have the skills or the patience to set up a PDF file. Some of the PODs have easy-to-follow directions. Plus the PODs make the work available on Amazon, so grandparents on the other side of the country can buy it if they want.
From Christine:
On the other hand... if you give a child the sense that they've "published" a book, they may not progress. Much like the PA mindset we've seen from some, you get the "why do I have to learn" syndrome.
Some kids—and I'm lucky to work with a bunch of them!—are always looking for ways to improve. Each new project has to be better than the last. Those kids will do fine. It's the kids—and adults—with only one book in them that want to rest on their laurels.
One concern I have with kids publishing books—or even articles—is that they'll later be embarrassed by what they wrote when they were younger.
This year, I've met a few kids who were embarrassed that they'd been taken by the International Library of Poetry. (I was too, I tell them. And then I tell them about my dog who is a semi-finalist and who is working on a book to submit to PA). But a lot of kids already know that there are lots of scams out there. And these kids already know that publishing isn't easy.
*One teacher I worked with sponsored the school paper. Big "holes" mysteriously appeared in all the justified columns of the paper. I was able to explain why—and how to fix them. Seems that this teacher insisted students were to put TWO spaces after every period they way her typing teacher had taught her. Not too bad for class reports with ragged right margins, but hell on justified text.