“Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.” - Roald Dahl
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NOTE: This story was written several years ago but got lost in the depths of my documents folder until I discovered it today. Alex is almost 16 now - God give me strength, she still loves reading, still wants to be a writer, and is still making brilliant connections.
My daughter Alex gives me great hope for the future.
She was 7 last summer and on a kick of reading books by
Roald Dahl. (Loved James and the Giant
Peach and The BFG, but hated The Witches and put that one down after
several pages.) Trying to support her interest, I picked up a Dahl essay “Ideas
to help aspiring writers” because it shows some of what he thinks when he
writes, and because Al herself is an aspiring writer.
“Any good story must start with a strong plot that gathers momentum all
the way to the end. My main preoccupation when I am writing a story is a
constant unholy terror of boring the reader. Consequently, as I write my
stories I always try to create situations that will cause my reader to
1)
Laugh
(actual loud belly laughs)
2)
Squirm
3)
Become
enthralled
4)
Become
TENSE and EXCITED and say, ‘Read on! Please read on! Don’t stop!”
As I read it to Al before bed, I understood her yawns and
lack of interest in this piece of nonfiction. I get no less from students –
even honors-level students in my International Baccalaureate English class who
are 10 years her senior, so I bring the essay to a logical close before its
end.
The next day, Alex was sitting on the couch reading The BFG on her own when she called me
over to point out a particularly gruesome part where Dahl explains how the
other giants, other than the BFG, eat people, and how she laughed at it in
spite of herself. “Dad, that’s like what you said about how the writer likes to
make you laugh but also likes to make you squirm.”
“Alex, that’s incredible,” I replied. “You’re making
connections that I try every day to get my students to make. And they’re big
kids.”
“Really?”
And so I’ll continue to give Alex the outside texts that may
help her continue making her own connections between books, characters, themes,
and authorial intent. And I’ll continue my efforts to keep pushing all of my
kids – at home and in the classroom – to build their intellectual collection,
connections and personal meanings. And for anyone who says this is above their
heads, that they must be carefully led through scaffolded steps toward these
individualized connections and meanings (i.e. the teacher’s), I’ll tell them,
“Hey, an 8 year old can do it.” Or just bring in Alex to teach it.
Maybe Groucho Marx was right
when he said, “Why this is so easy a four-year-old could understand it. Now run
out and find me a four-year-old. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.”
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