Don’t let anyone tell you that today’s kids can’t write!
As a new batch of eBooks begin to roll out, the excitement is palpable.
It’s that time of the semester, when my 7th graders begin to write and publish their eBooks. The idea of being a ‘published’ author fires them up. They have stories waiting to take flight, and I see my job as a technology teacher paving the runway.
Consider these titles in the works:
‘The Hotel’ — About a boy who gets trapped in a hotel and uncovers its dark secrets.
‘Thalassophobia’ — Yes that obscure fear of the ocean, in a twisted story.
‘Racetrack’ — The diary of a ‘newsie’ in New York City’s past. Sounds like I’ll discover a historical fiction writer.
‘Cinders and Scales’ — A fantasy novel about a girl named Cinder, and the ‘scales’ seem to imply something else.
‘Surviving Chernobyl’ — About the radioactive accident in Ukraine in April 1986. The student wrote this book two years ago, and today came in ask me to help her print 10 copies. The above image was the cover we uploaded.
There are more! So don’t let anyone tell you that Gen Z can’t write. They can, if we get them off their phones. Working in a classical school, this I know: Good writers become good consumers of content; Good readers develop good communication skills whether it’s a science report, or a paper about the ghost in Hamlet.
Over the past three years, I’ve have had to build a website to showcase the books of students, and have printed about a dozen of them. It’s almost as if I’m running an underground publishing company on a shoestring budget. Here’s a selection from one of the digital bookshelves.
If you’re reading this, you already know the value of cultivating writers and readers. Someday their books will be on the bookshelves of my local library. Until then, they’re on the shelves in my Little Free Library at school.
