How, or A List of Items Which Students Should Practice in the Space of Their Writing Instruction

1. Curiosity
2. Breaking Words into Pieces
3. Dissecting Ideas
4. Finding meaning in what appears meaningless (or at least meaning-indifferent)
5. Wrestling with Words

Notes:
1. Can it be awakened? Can we find ways to make people ask questions of the world, to inquire more, to explore without a hot academic branding iron threatening them from behind their chair? Can we be curious ourselves and pass that along to the minds we are charged with cultivating? Can we teach people how not only to answer but to ask?

2. Words: pinatas, easter eggs, matryoshka dolls, shipping crates, envelopes, cocoons, cargo planes, Armored Personnel Carriers, lockets, mason jars, lunch boxes, milk cartons, et cetera.

3. This must be one of the great powers: to find the ways in which Something can become This Thing and That Thing and Those Things. It is an unstoppable force because we can find ways to stop all kinds of physical projectiles and pathogens, but we cannot defend our ideas from the sharp scalpel of an intelligent mind.

4a. There is always meaning.
4b. It is there, beneath the surface, poking a corner through, showing a bit of color, waiting.

5. In a cage, with folding chairs. In the backyard, against older brothers. In a mask, flying from the top rope. In the arena, dusty and gored. By the bike racks, for your lunch money. By a river, for your name. When you come out the other side, you are less stoppable than you were before.