As both a writer, and a teacher of writing, I've been noticing more and more the disparity between the two.  That is to say, the way teachers are told by the government to teach writing, is often in direct opposition to the way that a good writer actually writes.

Let me give you an example.  My son came home from school with a piece of homework in which he was asked to replace the word 'said' with lots of other words that mean the same thing (replied, shouted, told, answered, you get the picture).  But any would be novelist who reads any of the myriad books on writing knows that the word 'said' is an invisible word.  The novelist uses it because it doesn't interfere with the telling of the story.  A novel with 'replied' and 'shouted' in it would very quickly get chucked on the slush pile.

Similarly all those 'interesting' words that children are encouraged to use in their lessons on writing, adverbs in particular (this was another bit of my son's homework task).  It was not sufficient for someone to have 'shouted', they had to have 'shouted angrily'.  But again, any fiction writer knows that this is in direct contravention of the 'show, don't tell' rule.  It's easy to put 'shouted angrily', much harder to think of a way to convey that without telling the reader.  I guess you could try: 'he said, spitting the words from his mouth as though they had a bitter taste'.

Perhaps it's like art.  To become the literary equivalent of a Picasso, a Van Gogh or a Lowry - someone who bends and breaks the rules, who 'draws like a child' - we must first learn to how to write by the rules.  Or maybe it's to do with the current obsession in the teaching of writing for 'naming the parts' - if children have to be able to identify a substantive clause at 100 paces, I'd jolly well better get them to use it.  "But that's a subject for another blog entry," she whispered mysteriously ...