So many films for younger audiences, from Finding Nemo to The Incredibles to How to Train Your Dragon, teach them to take pride in being different. So many children’s movies tell kids that it’s important to “be yourself.” It’s ok to be a mutant or divergent. Today, in children’s films at least, individuality is being pushed as a positive virtue for young minds.
You are special.
Be yourself.
Yet, in real life, how often are children allowed to be themselves?
What about the real life world of education, are we really encouraging children to be themselves?
I remember dropping out of an English class in middle school because I was having trouble adhering to its rules of writing. The reason? The problem wasn’t that I had little motivation to produce interesting, informed work. The problem was that I was using seven-instead-of-five-adjectives-per-paragraph. That I had one-too-many-sentences in my papers. That I wasn’t-using-enough-transitive-verbs.
The problem was that teaching me to mimic an example paragraph was easier than engaging me in the work of discovering my unique writer's voice.
This situation isn’t unique to my experience—it’s embedded in every textbook that would rather teach the rules, instead of the art, of writing. It’s encoded in every lesson that finds it easier to teach MLA formatting than the musicality of diction. Sometimes even well meaning educators turn unquantifiable aesthetic sensitivity into calculus, artistic standards into rules.
This struggle didn’t become quite clear to me until I entered college. I remember sitting in a creative writing workshop during my freshman year, listening to two honors teachers discussing concrete poetry.
By “discussing” I mean “cutting to bits.”
I distinctly one of them saying, with a short laugh, “Oh, shape poetry! If you’re not in fifth grade, don’t do it.”
I then distinctly remember thinking of my high school writing teacher, who was a lover of shape poetry. Due to her influence, John Hollander’s “Swan And Shadow” is one of my favorite poems of all time.
Now, here were two artists whom I admired greatly, who wrote spectacular stuff and definitely were aware of what qualities made writing great. I was stuck between two opinions that seemed equally credible. I had no idea of what the rules were because there seemed to be two competing sets of rules.
That was the moment that I realized the importance of being myself.
In that moment, I realized that no one was going to tell me the “right” thing to do. In the end, I'm going to face many sets of legitimate opinions that clash over certain issues. And, in the end, it will be up to me to decide what I want to do with my writing. It’s up to me to decide whether shape poetry is worth consideration or not. (Spoiler alert: I believe it is.)
In the end, it’s important for us to teach children that after learning the rules, there will be moments when they will have to break them in order to assert their own voice. After learning the importance of using a certain proportion of adjectives in a paragraph, I should have been taught that Hemingway steered clear of adjectives and Fitzgerald brought them to the party in hordes. And, of course, students should be taught that in those moments when they don't even know what the rules are, but they sense something that just must be crafted to words on the page, they can confidently follow the creative impulse into the murky unknown knowing that the likes of EB White's Elements of Style will be waiting on the other side.
Remember, writing is a process and when it comes to writing the most important thing is to raise your voice. The most important thing is to be authentic, to be yourself.
And I mean it.
-Constance