My student mentee was not present today, and so I was paired up with a student from a different class. She wanted to share with me a fantasy story she was working on. It was not something she was expected to hand in, it was her own piece which she hoped to one day develop into a book. It was so pleasing to see that some students enjoy writing so much that they make time to write extracurricularly. She insisted on reading it to me as she thought her hand writing was illegible. This made it difficult to assess the actual conventions of her writing, but I convinced her to let me read over her shoulder along with her. She had an incredible talent for hooking the reader in with great introductory paragraphs and nail-biting chapter endings. I was very, very impressed.
She had some conventional mistakes such as incorrect capitalization, a few spelling errors, and the odd grammatical issue, but she often caught these as she was reading to me. The session helped to act as a draft edit and review for her, as she changed a number of character and plot details as she went along, often on her own but sometimes with my suggestions.
I asked her why she chose to hand write instead of type, and she revealed to me that she couldn’t type. She used one hand and didn’t know where all the keys were and it was painfully slow. I was surprised, as I assumed in this day and age that all adolescents were whizzes with computers. Realistically, however, most of them use their cell phones for everything that my generation started doing on a computer. The computer is now used almost exclusively in an academic setting and is therefore not something adolescents are overly fluent with. I found this very interesting, and it brings to question our concerns about spell-check and autocorrect replacing grammar convention and spelling skills. Both students seemed to have a pretty good handle on both, without the use of a computer.
I was disappointed to miss out on a session with my original partner, as I fear it has interrupted our progress a bit. But it was nice to see another student’s work as well and to make some comparisons. It was refreshing and uplifting to see the consistent creativity and mastery of language and voice.
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