Yes, I’ve started to do homework again.

During his first week back to school this year, my Middle School aged son, who just officially became a teenager and promised me he wouldn’t become evil like his older brother, came home telling me his Language Arts teacher was teaching the class how to “Write Small”.

The first thing that went through my head was, “Oh, no, when ARE they going to stop with the Penmanship nonsense.” Having always had terrible handwriting, penmanship was always my downfall. To me, it was formula art. To me, good penmanship was not a measure of intelligence. It was just pretty. It was always hard for me to make a decent first impression because my script is practically illegible. Both of my children seem to be afflicted with the same elementary school curse. In our family, we type notes to each other. It’s not unusual to see a computer generated “Be Back Later. I’m at Joe’s” note taped to the door.

“Penmanship?” I asked. “In seventh grade?”

“Oh, no, Mom,” Steven said. “She’s teaching us how to write about small things instead of keeping our topic large. She calls it Writing Small.”

I was relieved that it wasn’t a penmanship lesson and that the teacher was going outside the box to teach my son and his friends a writing technique.

I learned more about this at Open House when she explained this concept to the parents in detail.

On the board, the teacher had the children brainstorm. She started with World Peace as her topic. She said this was too much to attempt writing about, so she had the students reduce it. Her topics below World Peace were World War I, then the Battle of the Bulge, then air raids, then the atomic bomb. She seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, reducing her scope at each step. Then she directed them toward personal wars. The last item on the World Peace list was fighting with a sibling over who gets “shotgun.”

I immediately jotted the idea down in my notebook. I also scribbled other things down that she said. My son is going to be doing a lot of writing this year. I’m a happy camper.

The teacher sent the students home to do an assignment. She gave them a choice from six topic trees she had listed on the board, all similar to the World Peace list, and told them to write a short, specific paragraph about the smallest thing at the end of the list. She limited them to three sentences about this single item.

My son chose the Autumn List. He showed me his list and at the bottom was “a leaf falling off a tree.” I left him alone to write, and I thought he came up with something good. He wrote three specific sentences using specific words, and his writing drew a great picture in my mind.

Unfortunately, on the day it was due, when he read it aloud in class, the teacher liked it, but she insisted he turn it into a first person piece where HE was the leaf. I thought, in my realistic point of view and as a writer, this was directing him down a silly road. He felt the same way. I made a few jokes about how wonderful it was to have a leaf in the family. I asked him if he’d be “leaving” us and made some bad puns. Objectively speaking, his original was extremely good and stood on its own. However, he’s in it for the grade at school, so he did what he was told. The first person rewrite was a decent paragraph, but it sounded kind of dumb to both of us.

I’ve started looking at topics I’m writing about , trying to reduce the scope of the topic just as my son has been doing. It’s a very effective exercise.

Last night I told my son I wanted to write an article about how his assignments help me write. I was having trouble getting started. My son said, “Write small, Mom. Write about a leaf.”