A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Can you keep having tea parties and going to art museums when your kids hit the age where “it all counts”? Will your college-bound teen be prepared enough if you continue to use the Brave Writer Lifestyle as your guide for language arts and writing instruction?

Or as one parent asked me, “I’ve loved Brave Writer for my child’s younger years, but what writing program would you recommend now that my student needs to get ‘serious’ about writing?” Ouch!

The foundation you lay in your child’s younger years is critical to who your child writers will be in their teens and beyond. There’s no “un-bridgeable chasm” between limericks, lists, and letters, and the academic formats like the expository essay and research paper. Literally, the writing your kids do now (or when young) IS the training for the writing they do as teens and beyond.

Let’s look at speech again. You don’t expect a fluent five year old to lead a business sales meeting, to give a speech or to make a Power Point presentation. On the other hand, all that talking and expressing, the poems recited, the manners learned for introductions and the telephone, the oral reports done in a co-op class—these do all lead the child to eventually have the capacity to learn how to teach or present or speech-ify.

As you head into the white water rapids of high school, remind yourself that the strategies you’ve used up until then will be your best aids for growth in the college-prep years. What are those strategies? Let me remind you, so you can affirm them to yourself.

Reading quality writing. In high school, reading should include non-fiction titles, essays, editorials, reviews, poetry, short stories, both American and British lit, classic and popular novels, and the whole world of online options (discussion forums, chat rooms, blogs, news sites, etc.).

Freewriting. Use freewriting techniques to explore the developing rhetorical imagination of your student. Rather than writing about any old thing, introduce your kids to freewriting about ideas—how they form their ideas, what those ideas mean to them, what the “other side” thinks about those ideas, and how your students react to the opposing point of view.

Brave Writer Lifestyle Items. Keep art, music, novels, movies, nature, and poetry going. In their teens, though, students will find specialties (their favorites), and will be able to delve deeply into the ones they love. Your teens ought to become “obsessive fans” of LOTR or Korean pop music or Chihuly blown glass or spoken word poetry or Scott Orson novels or birding expert Pete Dunne or Shakespeare plays. Let them! This is how teenagers discover the other layer of the subject area – the critics, the fans, the influences from other artists/scientists in the field. This is how they discover the academic task: bringing their perspective to bear on the established field as they develop intimacy with the topic and its field of experts. This is what they will do in college, in fact! But they will apply this skill set to sociology, anthropology, mathematics, and political science.

What will you add to this mix in high school?

Some intentionality is necessary. Good news. Your teens are ready for it! They need two things from you in high school: Freedom to risk, opportunities for adventure.

Risk and adventure can be experienced in both activity (taking a trip to Mexico to work in an orphanage) and thought (examining theories of gaming). Both are necessary. Teens want to prove to themselves that they will be adults one day. They can’t know it on the inside until they have evidence on the outside. They don’t know it by staying in the same living room they’ve been in since birth, with the same people, reading parent-selected material, following a routine of workbooks and text books.

They discover that they are capable of leaving home and family when they have some experiences that test them—that require them to act independently, and that encourage them to think “new-to-them” thoughts.

In writing, that means that they will need preparation for academic writing. They will want to understand how the writing they’ve done in the previous years relates to this new standard in writing. (Some programs treat writing from the younger years as though it has no relevance to the next level of writing, which is tragic.)

Teens should be encouraged to sign up for the local Shakespeare Company as actors (something my kids did), join a marching band, travel with a show choir, play high level sports, or take classes in local high schools or community colleges. They need to get out into the community in their areas of interest so that they can find out that they have what it takes to stand on their own two feet, to prove to themselves that they are growing up.

In Brave Writer, we’ve designed Help for High School and all of our online writing classes for teens with this goal in mind—showing teens how what they’ve been doing relates to what they are being called on to do now. These classes help them to learn how to think rhetorically, how to examine argument, and how to select credible support for their thesis statements. They also learn the vocabulary of expository writing—terminology for analysis, how to form substantive opinions, and how to manage their biases and blind spots. They learn the formats so they have practice using them.

Between specific instruction in academic writing and exploration of a variety of subjects (fashion, linguistics, music, role playing games, nutrition, animation, computer programming, sports, organic gardening…whatever your kids find interesting), your teens will become prepared for life beyond homeschool. For example, college is a depth experience in specific liberal arts and sciences fields. Deep diving IS the right preparation for that world. That’s why homeschoolers do well in college! They already understand how to teach themselves, how to read critically, how to develop and form a legitimate opinion (as long as they have the chance to do those things as teens).

So keep doing what you’re doing, and add a little intentionality in high school, and your kids will be fine!

Image by Wonderlane

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