Jeff Rogers

Teaching students in Korea over the past 12 years had led to some amazing relationships with young people, and those have led to some amazing stories in book form.

One of the exercises I try go through with my students is to write novels and publish them. This doesn't always work out, since kids can sometimes be less than stable, but when it does work out, the process leads to some very interesting and rewarding journeys.

One of my students started a book in the second grade, and we recently finished it now, when he is in the seventh grade. It was an epic effort, but well worth it. Sigma577 is about Earth in the future, and one human team's effort to survive against the odds, with nefarious aliens getting in the way.

Another student loves cats, and would get herself in trouble feeding neighborhood strays, which the neighbors frowned on since the troop of bedraggled felines tended to grow larger and larger when she did. Anyway, her first book took a year to complete, and the second came soon after. The stories that came out of those efforts are both heartwarming and adventurous at the same time.

But along with the fiction are the more meaningful human stories of a maturing mind and heart that writing a large and difficult book wrought on the kids, and on me. Although I write copiously on my own, writing with co-authors whose first language is not English and whose minds are young and effervescent has had profound effects on me as a human too. You might imagine what such and experience is like.

You certainly learn to love the kids when you go through a project like that, and to love their developing minds. I think too many young people avoid large challenges, and perhaps literary ones most of all. I find it a shame to see 'the book' gradually being replaced by 'the bullet point', and know that mass stupefaction is a risk we run going down that inevitable but slippery slope.

But large rewards don't come with mass movements, but rather with individuals, and the richness of the human experience really resides there. If I could make a recommendation to any adult, it would be to take on a young person's mind as a project. See if you can be an influence toward a more carefully literate personality as an outcome. There are rewards both obvious and subtle in the undertaking.