A precious treasure trove
A rich vocabulary provides more words, more than a poor one anyway, with which to create universes of diverse depths and layers. Thinking about spoken and written language, I gather this richness is one of the most important tools to achieve in order to incentive imagination and improvisation skills for the creative expression of thoughts; language creates the world, that perception it’s indisputable at certain point. At the same time, verbs are the core of storytelling and their correct conjugation is fundamental to master the structure of Portuguese language.
I really enjoy to teach kids who are learning to read and write, both in their mother tongue as in Portuguese, how to build and keep using their own verbs-dictionary. To realize over time how they have been individually growing (self made dictionaries and kids' vocabulary alike) has been one of the most rewarding long time creative processes for me to observe regarding pedagogy techniques. To be able to see the dictionaries grow as the persons become proficient in the language is to see them achieving the ability to devise existence in different times and therefore to communicate not only about continuity, but also of their present moments and questions, memories and future hypotheses, wishes and conditions. That is no less than enabling the autonomous expression of whatever reality one is capable of conceiving with a very personal style and philosophy. To acquire a [new] language is to become a more complete oneself in a lot of different ways.
Today I got to collaborate with the kid whom I teach Portuguese to for longer in creating new worlds for The Little Prince (the Portuguese translation from French), of which he has been reading several chapters for school. The weekly task was to develop more chapters with new planets and its inhabitants for the main character to visit and have a chat with. For a couple of hours, we entertained ourselves with his fabrication and audio recording of self created mirrored-visions of present reality. That is only my interpretation of his work anyway; the short chapters were called "planeta festa" (party planet), "planeta a preto e branco" (black and white planet) and "planeta do guerreiro romano" (roman warrior's planet). They could consist of a single short story called “thrill, depression and war”, the theme selection was that accurate... but what I most appreciated were the particular details of the senses’ impressions, such as descriptions of light and smell, and both metaphoric allusions to feelings towards nowadays’ reality or reality marks in the dialogue and thoughts, like little prince following the fragrance of bifanas into the circus tent at "party planet"", where he was forced to dance for hours, but no guest would ever arrive; the sad man from "black and white planet" saying leave me alone, let me be sad; or the roman warrior barely fitting in his own fort, constantly fearing an attack against the tiny planet. Other possible titles for these lovely accounts, if I were to choose, could also be "reflections on some archetypical states of mind generated over pandemic" or more simply "creative diaries from isolation à la Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aged 14".
Those were just my thoughts on the way home after tutoring, while feeling fortunate to still have some work and feeling helpful. I'm so proud of this kid and truly excited to see how joyful he also was with the achievement. After all, he was feeling great about his own fictional conceptions in a foreign language (he doesn't normally feel specially comfortable with creative writing). It's very hard to be isolated at 14 and not even complaining much, but still trying to thrive. It is really inspiring to see someone doing so out of their comfort zone with such a will, keen to both maintaining the foundations and keep building further - improvisation skills might be part of it either and I have had the pleasure of being able to lead the way to some writing [among other] techniques applying them. I wish to save some of the implied fortitude in the attempt for myself.
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