I taught a class on autobiography and memoir this week, in which my students (ages 10-13) were writing short essays about one memorable event in their lives. I had to talk multiple students down from their insistence that they remembered the day they were born well enough to write about. One stared meaningfully off into the distance and said, "I saw a bright light. A man in a white coat. Slapped me on the back." Even if this is theoretically possible, what would be the odds of having more than one in the same room?
Obviously I couldn't verbally fact-check all of them, so I'll never know whether L. was allowed to play nickel slots in a casino on vacation or if my co-teacher M. really pushed her sister off her bike and then told her it was an accident. But after protesting that nothing had ever happened to them, they all wrote very specific accounts with a bizarre level of detail. I sat feeling blank till S. asked me for a story about "doggies"; I never had a dog, so I wrote about the time I got attacked by an Irish mastiff instead. (This didn't bother her.) She wrote about learning to swim in a deep pool and the feeling of looking down past your toes, down into the water.
If you've bothered to read this far you must be quite bored; but it's Free Comic Book Day, so go out and do that.
5 days ago
1 comment:
There are three or four comic book shops in my neighborhood, in part because we have a lot of children, but mainly because Park Slope is where comic book nerds like Jonathan Lethem, my downstairs neighbor and myself go to get old. I'll have to check it out.
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