I’m setting a goal to write five times a week, even if it’s just a short paragraph.
My son recently gave a presentation at school, a project that combines work done in three different classes over about a two month period. Teams of two give results of their chemistry experiments, explaining methods and math in pretty impressive powerpoint presentations. Everybody dresses up – shirts and ties, skirts and dresses, the whole package. Parents are invited to attend; it’s the climax of the year, really. The teachers in this program are interested in preparing the kids for what they’ll be asked to do when they get to college and each year the presentations get a little more advanced, a little more in depth. And the kids, hopefully, get a little more comfortable.
He’s lucky he a gets a chance to do this (although he might not see it that way). It’s part of a special Math Science and Technology school that he attends for half a day after half a day at the regular high school. There’s nothing like this at the regular high school. No cross-disciplinary projects or corrobration between classes. No parent invitations. No big projects that help tie together the year’s work. I’m very thankful that he’s been given an opportunity to experience this kind of work bu t I can’t help thinking about all the other kids who didn’t get into the program and who won’t have the advantage of this kind of practice when they get to college.
So, anyway, feeling thankful, aware that exposure to things makes us more comfortable, enables a naturalness or ease of use that doesn’t happen automatically. I wonder how often immersion or exposure is mislabeled “natural talent.”
The day of the presentations, I rode my bike the five miles or so to my son’s school. This was a mini adventure for me. Although I frequently ride with my daughter all over the neighborhood, my son’s school is in the opposite direction and involves crossing seven-lane VanDyke along with segments of unpaved turf. I thoroughly overestimated how long it would take me to get there and ended up with about an hour and half to kill before his scheduled time. OK so this was a mini-mini adventure but I realized something as I was riding just to have something to do while I waited for my time to go into the school. I began to feel the naturalness, the spontaneity that I felt as a kid as I ditched the bike to sit under a tree or hung on hard to the handlebars and decided to cross a wide bumpy feild. The bike became an extension of me because my body remembered and my mind forgot. It was exhilarating.
Thinking so often gets in the way of enjoyment or even performance. To do anything well, I think we have to be comfortable enough to forget what we’re doing and just do it. It takes exposure and practice. Bike riding, presentations, writing – the more we do it, the more natural it becomes.
