Birth Of An Author?

I'm not sure if I mentioned this on my blog already, but my 6.14 year old homeschooled son and I recently conceived and started writing a *story*.

It's about a personified pencil - PencilEd (a play on "pencil head"), his severed hindquarters EraserBurt (a play on "eraser butt"), and sundry similar characters. See his post - Pencil Ed.

Anyways I came up with the initial idea (I think), we talked about it a lot, and then set to work trying to sketch the cast and storyline.

Eventually we sat down, me at my PC and my son 6 feet away at his, and I created a *shared* Google Doc so he could read along as I started typing up the ideas we had been jawboning. I kind of got into it a little but my son....he was absolutely RIVETED in his seat.

It was all he wanted to do for weeks thereafter!

"Dad, can we do some more PencilEd???", became a nagging refrain.

I did do a little more with him but then I checked out on our joint-venture completely. PencilEd was a casualty of limited time and priorities.  A horrible homeschooling parent, I've been leaning more and more on edu-activities THAT DID NOT INVOLVE ME.

But in hindsight my negligence looks like a masterstroke. One day a couple of weeks ago the 6 year old Prince sat down and continued the story all on his own. He implored me to take a look at it more than a few times but I never did - until just the other day.

I was absolutely blown-away with what he wrote. And when I showed it to my first wife she too was incredulous, and interrogated me hard as to whether or not I *helped* him. I most certainly DID NOT.

Here's a link to a copy of our very rough story. The beginning is almost all my work but I clearly indicate where my son takes over:

Pencil Edventures

What do y'all think?

I was particularly taken aback by his penchant for *suspense* and *flow*; and I like how he changed fonts/font sizes for emphasis. He is only 6 after all.

But realize that he's read nothing short of a bazillion books already. So he's well-aquainted with basic literary form.

See also:

Prince C-Nut - Book Devourer

Raising a Bibliophile.

Homeschooling - Unleashing Creativity?

Yesterday, in the fog of our morning activities, the 6.00 year old Prince grabbed some blank paper and disappeared to the quiet upstairs. Here's what he created - click to enlarge if necessary:

*Dora Haters Comics* - a brief story, culminating in asesinato!

Well yeah, his art is middling at best, and we do probably have to work on him constructing plots of higher moral fiber...

But still, my wife and I were very impressed with the fact that he did this entirely on his own.

His non-stop book devouring has obviously stimulated his imagination AND also ingrained in him the basics of literary form.

See also:

Prince C-Nut - Book Devourer

Raising A Bibliophile

The Anti-College Argument....Staring The World In Its Face!

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

That was Steve Jobs describing himself during Stanford's 2005 commencement speech.

So yeah, he was a perspicacious college drop-out, along with Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and a host of other titanic innovators.

College simply isn't worth the time, the energy, the money, or the humanity it demands.

Not to mention, it's going to take *graduates* at least 10 years - if they are even lucky enough to see what's wrong with themselves - to break off the mental manacles from others-directed learning.  Heck I'm 36 years old and still haven't recovered from the bad advice and false-promises of Big Education.

All these Apple-lovin', Steve Jobs-worshipping geeks...

They have him up on a pedestal but yet still go through with years of schooling themselves AND they send their kids down that path as well!

Birth Of A Bard

The Frog Climbs Up The Tree

A frog jumps in the water
all the places it goes

One day he went up a tree
all the way up a tree

As high as he can
with his sticky feet

He didn't know he was up there
he got up to the highest place

He fell all the way down to the water

To his favorite place
home.



What famous poet composed that?

Well, it was my 5.11 year old son, Prince C-Nut!

That was the *first* one he wrote. Though my wife said his next two were a bit on the silly side.

He must have gotten the idea from a two-line frog poem by Basho in one of the books we just read.

We're going to do everything we can to ensure that our homeschooled kids turn out *creative* and thus *productive* adults. This way they won't have to waste their lives as wage slaves or skimmers - a la Mom and Dad.

On Creativity

Throughout my life I have always considered myself to be "uncreative". I simply could or did not build, imagine, or produce anything. In fact, I reckon this blog is the first and only tangible thing I have ever produced in my entire life.

So why wasn't I creative? I always assumed I lacked the gene but have since dismissed that explanation. In fact, I am feeling my creative juices swell these days, so much so that I am even contemplating writing some fiction! So apparently I do have the capacity to imagine. Heck, most of my utterances are total BS anyway - how much of a leap is there from that to the land of make-believe?

Here's a long (20 minute) clip of Ken Robinson who asks, "Do Schools Kill Creativity":



Ken brings up the point that modern schooling is only 100 years old and that it was set up to serve "industrialists" by emphasizing math and literacy instead of "creativity". He doesn't dare mention the "political mind control" aspect to his progressive audience. It's not even clear that he understands that phenomenon. But his talk is peppered with decent jokes and has at least a palatable thrust, so there's reason enough to watch it.

So, does mass schooling in fact kill creativity?

Of course it does. It saps that and a few other core human potentialities.

The last two books I've read were on Mark Twain and Walt Disney - two towering examples of American creativity. Perhaps, I can soon do a more involved post on them and the subject in the future.

If I could only create free time...