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from Natural Life magazine, July/August
2009 Bowling and the Art of Writing "By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn." - Latin Proverb I decided to do some writing with my kids. Our homeschooling group’s newspaper had a deadline coming up, they had both said they were interested in writing for it and I needed to write my next column, so I thought of it all as a harmonic convergence of writing and that we could do all of it together. I also saw it as a chance to work with each of them on writing and have them actually produce something and experience writing on a deadline, and from all this I would get some nugget of wisdom and write my column from that. The positive thing that has come out of all of this is writing with my older sons (or rather them dictating to me and me figuring out how to give feedback and them reworking and editing and me seeing the final product develop) and, as an added bonus, it made me realize just how proud I am of them. It is clear that they are both very talented at writing; it comes to them organically. My younger son worked on another installment of a fictional series he began two years ago. He has such a grasp of language and tells such an engaging story that I must admit I am jealous, as I couldn’t write fiction to save my life. My older son worked on a report on seeing Emmanuel Jal speak at UMass Amherst and related information on the Sudanese Civil War. I am amazed at the way he can effectively organize his thoughts, distilling information down to its most potent form, engaging people and providing readers with the most important, moving facts of a situation. Some may say that they write because I write or I share some secret with them, like the kid in high school who did so well on those physics projects and just happened to have a dad who was an engineer. But the truth of the matter is that they do this in spite of me, not because of me (or because of my wife either, who has a love of writing and great talent there as well.) Exhibit A proving this point: I didn’t discuss this project with my wife. I didn’t because I had a feeling she would make me think twice about doing it. And it would have been good advice. It’s kind of like if Mussolini came to you and said he wanted to see if he could lead a project with the train workers to make the trains run more efficiently: You’d think it best if it just didn’t happen – better for the workers and better for Mussolini as well. That is to say – and this project reminded me of this – I am awful at “teaching.” And I am awful at it because when I “teach” it is all about me. I’m sure some people teach and it is not about them and there is probably a school somewhere where they teach and it is not about the school but about the students and there are probably other bureaucracies... To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's digital edition, which includes access to this and other back issues. Nathanael Schildbach lives and learns in western Massachusetts with his wife, three sons, dog, cat, racing pigeons that keep breeding and many ducks. Email him at natehampton@gmail.com. |
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