When Discovering a Literary Connection to the School Curriculum

The Literary Warrior With Common Sense Must Pounce On It!

Lots of former teachers are writers and some of us are very overt about matching the concerns and content of our books with what’s trending or entrenched in the provincial K-12 curriculum. STEM is a major driver right now in Canada and has been significant in books on the subject for a good while. STEM= Science, technology, engineering and math teaching for girls at the elementary and secondary level, specifically, presenting those subjects in a way which encourages confidence and concrete skills to girls so we can succeed at much better-paying jobs among other things. Math careers are valued monetarily more than, say, storytelling or childcare. Medical research is seen as more important, by most people in most countries, to the survival of human beings than fashion design. I get that. I’m all in favour of nutrition research and less damaging agriculture and healthcare solutions for what ails humanity, don’t get me wrong. Not to mention economic policies which do not condemn some populations on this planet to poverty or degrading or poorly paid work.

But I have always been more interested in stories. I spent the first twelve years of my life with no television and very little radio, so as to spare the batteries. We had hundreds of acres to explore, patient workhorses to ride, big gardens to plant, weed, water and harvest and cattle and chickens to look after. Our lovely Aunt Rose in Wales regularly sent us British newspapers and several highly-prized children’s magazines. My Welsh father and Dutch mother were both avid readers and listened to the Saturday opera on CBC Radio and the weather reports and news on CJDC from Dawson Creek. We had three shelves of books, none specifically for children but I read them all anyway. Our northern world was full of wild animals and migrating birds, small and large tragedies, forts of sticks, old boards, moss and snow, very real and well-imagined dangers, singing, sawing wood, hauling wood, water and snow, lots of good homemade food and bread and tea for all ages at three. My brain always sought connections, creating stories to make sense of it all, as a way to remember things. I memorized math to get through it all the way through to high school and promptly forgot it all except the times table up to twelve which Dad drilled into our heads. But beyond that, numbers are just flat things floating around in space, inert and one-dimensional. Utterly dull to me.

Which brings me to discovering the concept of proprioception while noodling about with words for migrating birds and whales while working as a lighthouse keeper in the 21st century. We all know about the basic five senses and I have always had a real and/or imagined sixth sense too. But when I was building scenes in my head and on paper, scenes which became the text for Have You Ever Heard A Whale Exhale? I read more about the concept and how the K-3 curriculum included it, at least in British Columbia. Then I knew this was the direction I needed to go. I had “found” the right voice or tone for the language in my head already. I need to find the right storytelling voice before I can write anything in any genre, for kids or adults.

Happily the Vancouver Island artist (and mom of two) Claire Victoria Watson https://clairevictoria.art/ shared the same whimsical sensibility about the subject. Three to five year olds do not respond to serious STEM content although some dreary adults, unfortunately, seem to think the book should have reams of marine biology facts and possibly statistics to be taken seriously. Meanwhile Claire painted a spy-hopping seal with a monocle and my vivid description of a urine-soaked herd of sea lions inspired her to put clothespins on gulls flying downwind! Four year olds respond to the sensory facts of life not statistics! But maybe not Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory…

Proprioception is generated by our own actions and by being out in the natural world. It encompasses the movement of our limbs and our core, or trunk (as in wearing flippers to swim like a dolphin) but it's also about stillness when we're playing hide and seek. It can be about the effort or tension needed to make a deep dive or the use of force to push or pull (thinking of the scene with a rowboat and oars). 

It's also about our 3-D sense of balance, our experience of heat, cold, hunger or pain (the range of human discomfort), and about the vibration or pressure we feel when a motor is running or a treadmill is below our feet. We can sense a heaviness or the lightness of our bodies. It's also about our sixth sense aka 'somatosensory' sense, for example, when we feel watched and the hair rises or prickles on our necks. It's our nuanced survival sense too when we don't feel right being in someone's company and we want to get away as quickly as possible. So this is an important sense to reinforce with kids who try to explain it. That’s the teachable moment, the time for a trusted adult, or smart older child, to say it's a good thing to pay attention to this inner radar, this inbuilt early warning system signalling fear, and to act on it, to remove ourselves from potential harm as soon as possible.

Children need their own entry level vocabulary and non-threatening concrete examples to understand what what they are experiencing, via their eyes, ears, nose, limbs, their entire bodies. This is what educated, intelligent and sensitive teachers understand. I was fortunate to have some truly inspired and inspiring elementary school teachers in our two room school in Cecil Lake, B.C. and where, somewhere around Grade 3, if memory serves, the Peace River’s Bookmobile Librarian, the wonderful Mr. Howard Overend, came out to deliver my idea of heaven on four wheels. I will do him and his magical bus justice in another post!

Thank you for reading and hey, it’s nice to tap the little heart to let me know you connected to the writing and therefore to my heart too! Otherwise we all type away like battery chickens sending our work out into the void, hearing only Simon & Garfunkel-like echoes in my mind. Generosity of spirit is a blesséd thing and it doesn’t cost a penny, is appreciated by many and there you have it. For the Sunday morning paying subscribers, Chapter Three will be in your mailbox, with thanks!