Not that I’m a brilliant writer, or have anything that anyone else doesn’t have within them, but on occasion I’ve been asked if I could teach someone to make magic with words.
One of those people was a friend with a journalism degree, who was applying to grad school, and not getting great results from his application essay. He asked me if I might be able to tweak it, I did my best, he loved it, and asked me what I’d done.
“You wrote everything I wrote, didn’t add or delete anything, and yet it’s magic. Can you teach me to do that?” I didn’t really know what I had done, so I wasn’t very helpful at the time. This happened many times over the years, and I wondered if ‘making magic’ was something inherent rather than something that could be taught.
Years later an opportunity arose to teach a class on writing for magazine publication to children in the GATE class at our sons’ elementary school. The students ranged from grades 3-5 with IQ’s that put them in the gifted range. As a child, I’d dreamed of becoming a teacher, and this opportunity both excited and terrified me…and ultimately, I’m sure that I learned more than the kids that I taught that year.
I also reminded the kids that if they happened to receive a rejection letter, it was a badge of honor, not very many people, even grown ups have actually had their work considered by a real publication. All of the students work was published in a school collection, and by the last day of class, they had promised to let me know when they heard from the publication they’d submitted to.
All summer I received excited phone calls from students who had received rejection letters. A few parents even told me that they’d framed them. And, two of my students were published in magazines.
The kids excitement to receive even a rejection reminded me how lucky I am to do what I love, and that rejection should be a learning tool, not the doorway to depression.
So there you go, just a few things that I learned teaching writing to children, and by the way my friend got into graduate school! I’m sure that with his GPA and the hard work he’d done as an undergraduate, he’d have been accepted anyway, but I’d like to think that there was a little bit of magic involved!
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