An introduction to an anthology of my students' work

Summer is for love, for fun, for iced cappuccinos and spiffy sunglasses and loitering in parking lots with friends and drifting off on a mountain bike romanticizing here and there. On top of this, there is a mystique about summer school: the coming together of boys and girls from different day schools in a fresh setting before a backdrop of sunshine and freedom and layers of colours in the summer night sky that await them in the afterschool hours as they walk along, carrying their books, thankful and cheerful, they say, “I’m making the most of my summer!” While the average highschooler is playing their summer around, a group of dedicated students have sacrificed potential playtime to participate in a course designed to improve their writing, and have, in the process, made their summer all the more fun and meaningful. This anthology is a mini-celebration of their achievement.

“Why don’t we write in class?” a student asked, a most logical question indeed, “I thought this was a writing course.” Writing is, altogether, a process of personal growth. The act of setting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a solitary and reflective process. The foundation of good prose lives in a fun-loving and compassionate mind that longs to explore and maximize the human experience. The workshop is designed to facilitate this experience, to imagine, to connect, to relate, to interact, to concretize, to laugh, and when the experience is rich, writing comes natural. In addition to this, the aim of the workshop is also to simplify and see through all that bunk surrounding writing, about grammar, about commas, about thesis, that have made writing and English as a subject pedantic and boring. Writing, like English, like learning, should be fun and relative to life, so that a student might, upon finishing a class, re-enter our urban streets and see all the colours afresh, colours that have always been there. This is why the workshop is characterized by selected readings, insightful discussions, and productively digressive interaction. All of the writing is done at home when the student is calm and reflective, albeit a little self-discipline is required.

The pieces featured in this anthology are written by students attending their final years of high school, knocking at the doors of universities, where vistas of possibilities await them. What better time to enroll in a workshop that encourages one to dream? The writings speak of ambitions, personal experiences, and various social issues, all of which reveal the early development of a thinking mind that is beginning to take intensive interest in this thing called life.

And that is how the summer passed, as the students might say to themselves as they fall pensive under a summer’s sunset to reflect upon a youthful and meaningful summer some years before. But for now, they are set to go back to school, back, at least temporarily, into the mechanical world of report cards and university acceptance letters. Only this time they are more equipped than before, shouldering a backpack of dreams and enhanced self-discovery, they might, upon re-entrance into their day school, appear self-possessed and rebellious, and for a split second feel invincible to the world. This is youth. This is consciousness in its early stages sprinkled with glimpses of a long-hidden dream. And it is hoped that the readers of this anthology can feel this youthful vibrancy. More importantly, it is hoped that the workshop participants themselves can at anytime of their adulthood fall back into this period of uncompromising idealism, for it is in here that one may find inspiration for a lifetime. May youth and summer be forever.