I have NEVER claimed that I was a very good student.
The truth is I didn’t enjoy school until I figured out that the easiest way to get a good mark in English was to write a really good story or play.
Indeed a lot of my love for writing originally stemmed from that goofy-looking kid who sat up close to the front of the classroom because he hadn’t yet learned that he actually needed glasses to wear to see from the back of the class.
I didn’t find out that I needed glasses until I was seventeen years old and was taking driving lessons and continued to drive the instructor’s car off of the side of the road.
Sometimes it takes an awful long time for a fellow to learn how to see.
That’s how it was in school.
I kept beating my head against the blackboard trying so very hard to be a “good” student when all that I really needed to do was to just be myself and tell my stories.
It reminds me of history class.
My history teacher was a gent named Bill Carrise who truly loved the study of history. He would sit up there at the front of the class telling us stories of ancient Kings and Queens just the same as some folks will tell you what their maiden aunt Gertrude has got up to with the town motorcycle gang.
One day Bill decided to retire to a stone farmer’s cottage in Southern Ontario to grow mooseberries or some such foolishness. Bill’s replacement was an ex-economics teacher whose idea of instruction was to sit perched upon the edge of her desk reading the history at us.
She kind of reminded me of a Spandau gunner sitting in her bunker mowing down us poor hapless students with a nonstop ack-ack-gack constant stream of monotone boredom.
At the end of the day history is nothing more than a series of well told stories – and sometimes an awful lot can hang on one good story.
Here endeth the lesson.
Now, for dessert, why don’t you give a look at this Youtube video that tells the entire History of the English Language in about eleven minutes flat.
And thanks to Nate Hoffelder over at THE DIGITAL READER for pointing this video out.
All of you folks out there who have any interest in indie-publishing or the digital world in general REALLY ought to be following THE DIGITAL READER.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 