Seeing Is Believing

Seeing is Believing

As long as we’re on the subject of creativity and kids, I’m going to include this review of I Am a Pencil. Read this book and let it take you back to the ingenuity of kids and the vision that “beginner’s mind” can bring to the page. Since the creative writers in the book truly are beginners, in life as well as art, they are still having their first look at a lot of stuff. This is a special way of “seeing” that all too often gets lost as we enter adulthood, the business worId, college, parenthood, whatever. I believe we can recover our sight. After childhood it just takes practice. It becomes an art which leads us to create or re-create what we are now seeing with fresh eyes. This is the way an artist wants and needs to see life. Let the children in I Am a Pencil help you remember how. “And a little child shall lead them....”

I Am a Pencil by Sam Swopes

I Am a Pencil is a memoir by children’s book author, Sam Swopes, about the three years he taught creative writing to a class of elementary school kids in Queens, N.Y. There are two important facts to remember as you read along. English is a second language to most of these kids, who altogether represent 11 different countries. And the teacher follows the same students ( or as many as return each year) through the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. This core group provides a unifying thread from year to year as Swopes engages us in his classroom adventures. We know these kids by the end of the book and feel invested in their futures.

Now I myself am a fiction reader. What I want when I turn on the bedside lamp and crack the pages open is a story--a well-written, exciting, imaginative story that’s at least novel length. But my sister, who is becoming a teacher this year at 40-something, recommended this book to me because I love to write. She may have had other reasons, but that’s how she hooked me.

From the opening pages of I Am a Pencil, I was indeed hooked, line and sinker. I felt like a student again in Swopes’ classroom. These were my peers, these 8 and 9-year-old students. I had a lift-top wooden desk, a Big Chief wide lines writing tablet, and two #2 pencils with hard new erasers and sharp points. Everytime I picked up this book, I sat down at my desk and joined the other kids in an intensely creative and soulful learning experience. The writings of these diverse children are incredible, lovely, heartbreaking, hilarious.

I fell in love with them, with their too-hard lives, with their instinctive, intuitive genius and with their teacher, Mr. Swopes. We go on field trips to the Met to study boxes, to Central Park to visit trees. We make boxes of all shapes and sizes with all kinds of uses. We create islands from our bodies and write letters to our adopted trees. Always, always we are exploring through language our own inner landscapes and diving deep into the undersea world of imagination. Everytime we submerge we’re surprised by what we find there.

Colored by their inheritance of different cultures, each child has a unique perspective which clearly emerges in their poems, stories, letters. Each student struggles with growing up and the lives they must go home to at the end of the day. At school, though, there’s Mr.Swopes--encouraging, editing, inspiring, correcting, caring, and teaching...truly teaching me, you, the children how to heal into wholeness through the joy of our own creations.

As you journey with Mr. Swopes from the 3rd through the 5th grades, perhaps you’ll recall a teacher, or even two or three, who changed you in some way. A teacher who managed to reach through the walls that even at that age we were already erecting in order to protect ourselves from pain. Dotty Strain, my English teacher instilled confidence in me by letting me know that I was a comprehensive reader and a good writer. Karen Overstreet, drama teacher, who involved me in plays and taught me to love the theater, effectively keeping me off the streets my last two years of high school. Mrs. Dickson, who everyone feared but who liked me and taught me discipline as well as history. The math teacher who was also a creative writing instructor (go figure) and nominated me for creative writer of the year. These were teachers who loved, who lead me through that lost land of childhood. These kinds of teachers save lives, even if they never know it. Unrecognized for the most part, and certainly underpaid, there are teachers like these still out there. As Mr.Swopes says, “It only takes one.” So in 2006 I’m electing Mr.Swopes as my teacher of the year. Next year it will be my sister. I already know what kind of teacher she’s going to be.

If you read only one nonfiction book a year, make it I Am a Pencil. It will make you remember that there is always something left to learn.