Member-only story
PERCEPTION AND EXPRESSION
Teaching Teens to Write Living Stories
It’s trusting that your head and your heart connect memories
Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?
— William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair
One of the best ways to know the connection between what fills your heart and what gives you clarity of thought is expressive writing. For twenty years, I taught teenagers writing, and was always surprised by how quiet students would become when we reached a point where trust among people was the crux of our topic.
When teenagers go completely quiet in a classroom, it’s always a pregnant pause. We would be touching upon part of the burden they all carry. It wasn’t only a social media issue; a random person could doctor an image of anyone in seconds, and it would spread like a match dropped in dry grass. The impact on relationships with friends led to frictions about first crushes or conflicts in longer-term romances. Everything was possible, yet it was all about the first time and uncertainty. Nobody had a family without challenges; many students had parents who lived in two different homes. Other students never got to know both of their biological parents because the…
