Book progress and stuff

Work on the book has been sporadic recently. I've found that I've been able to discuss some of its key concepts with a lot of my students recently but I sometimes feel like I'm just plugging it rather than teaching...

It never ceases to amaze me how articulate these people are, but how they seem to be convinced they know nothing. I wonder how much more they would get out of things if they were challenged more often to think intellectually rather than purely visually? What would happen, do you think, to their visual work?
Critics at my last place of work were definite: the visual would suffer.

Bullshit.

The problem is we focus too much on the finished article - it has to look glossy and 'professional'. I remember one of my students in my first year of teaching. He was perhaps one of the most original thinkers I'd ever met, able to sketch down an idea off the top of his head that immediately answered the problem. He would have made a great advertising creative.

But his finishing skills were crap. On one occasion I saw him struggling to make an idea 'look good' in Illustrator so I sat down and showed him how it would be done. He sat and watched as I took his idea and made it 'look good' while trying to point out that the two sets of skills were often separate in the real world - the artworker (the role I was playing) is usually not the same person who comes up with the rough ideas. But I think he missed that, focussing purely on how I did what I did, the speed at which I did it, and the fact that he could 'never be as good'. I saw a lot of him in me - I'm an ideas man, good at copywriting and coming up with creative solutions off the top of my head. I'm also a good art director, but just not good at the bit in between (the actual 'design', I suppose)

It wasn't his fault that he had this self-defeating view - the education system expected him to be a jack of all trades, particularly specilised in the finishing-off area. Consequently he was always labelled as being poor. He needed to be on a course that deliberately never took students to the finished artwork stage, but I'm not sure one exists. I toyed with developing one but was quickly shouted down by my 'it's all about the visual' colleagues.
The end result is his confidence was knocked and he was unfairly dismissed by teachers who think graphic design is about sticking things on walls and cooing over them. Idiots. What a stupid bloody system.

Last I heard this student was a runner in an ad agency - halfway there; he should have been running the place.

Anyway, back to the book. I wrote about 3,000 words yesterday which is most of a chapter. When I went to bed I felt pleased with myself but this morning they don't read so well. I'm supposed to be writing about design and identity but I've written loads on consumption - important to cover but maybe not the main focus here. I need to avoid getting depressed about it as that'll only lead to procrastination. I may even (shock horror) tidy up later to avoid writing. If things get desperate there's always the ironing...