America isn’t good at teaching anything that requires intensive practice and repetition. My dad’s spent most of his career writing grant proposals and reports for public health projects. Although English is his second language, it consistently fell to him to rewrite the often incomprehensible writing submitted to him by smart and credentialed doctors and public health professionals. His writing style is workmanlike—the most important thing in real-world writing is clarity and organization, not flourish.
As a lawyer, I also make my living writing. I learned more from my dad and other mentors than from school. I was fortunate to have a sixth grade teacher that assigned a lot of 10-page papers. My dad would make me sit down and do multiple drafts with him, giving me markup of papers with a red pen. I did the same thing with the judge I worked for, then after that senior lawyers I worked for. It was probably only in the last few years (I’m pushing 40) that I could claim to have become a good writer. It’s an extremely time consuming process that American schools are simply not set up to perform.
"America isn’t good at teaching anything that requires intensive practice and repetition."
I thought the number one criticism of American teaching is rote memorization and rote repetition and so kids leave with zero deep understanding of what they just did. Just muscle memory that fades.
AFAIK, rote memorization and rote repetition is not effective intensive practice and repetition.
Effective intensive practice and repetition involves doing the applying the same skill repeatedly in different contexts and variations, and particularly in different complex tasks which combine it in different ways with other skills.
As a lawyer, I also make my living writing. I learned more from my dad and other mentors than from school. I was fortunate to have a sixth grade teacher that assigned a lot of 10-page papers. My dad would make me sit down and do multiple drafts with him, giving me markup of papers with a red pen. I did the same thing with the judge I worked for, then after that senior lawyers I worked for. It was probably only in the last few years (I’m pushing 40) that I could claim to have become a good writer. It’s an extremely time consuming process that American schools are simply not set up to perform.