Kids Who Don’t Dream

I feel like I have to apologise to a lot of my readers. While I’d describe my writing as acerbic yet witty, madness with scant traces of brilliance, or ‘sometimes not that bad’, I can readily admit there are points where my rage breaks free from its corral of self-defeating humour and wry observation and bursts onto the web swinging its head back and forth, baying for blood.

You might be imagining now a wild-eyed beast with thick, sharp fur and rolling eyes. You might be seeing red and black a fang and claw, something more beast than human or human turning into beast. Unknown to me, and maybe unknown to you, but there are those out there who will read those lines and conjure no mental images. It’s the incredibly short time that I’ve spent learning how to teach these people (in this case, kids) how to actually imagine and discern meanging from writing that I’ve found myself with a completely new out-take on life. Two days of training and half a day of observing has taught me more about teaching and the true breadth of diversity that lies in human thinking than an entire semester of university, which I think speaks both to the strength of the training and the weakness that is humanity-deficient academia.

There have been too many occasions in which I’ve left a movie with someone and I’ve been met with the question ‘what happened?’. Whether it was my impatience, ignorance, or simple cruelty, I’d just think ‘What a fucking moron’, and try my best to explain the events that had taken place in a non-patronising manner (which, of course, has the absolute opposite effect). That to me was true stupidity — being unable to divine meaning or understand a sequence of events you sat through as a passive observer. It demanded nothing from you, yet the cogs failed to turn and you sat there, mouth agape, like a fumbling, drooling, sack of barely sentient potatoes.

Except that’s not what’s happening at all. Neural connections aren’t being made. The parts of the brain that are responsible for sequence maybe aren’t as well-developed, and perhaps, unlike narrative obsessed individuals like me, it just failed to grab your attention. And that’s fine. It doesn’t make people stupid, or slow, it just means they have different abilities. How the hell can I judge that way of thinking when I will stare at most maths problems like a fumbling, drooling, sack of barely sentient potatoes with a headcold?

So I’d like to try and adjust my writing to reflect this.