As is the practice every evening, my daughter of 4 years asks me to narrate a bedtime story. I try hard to cook up a story each evening and must admit that i sometimes spend the commute back home from work thinking of one. The challenge however has been to think of a creative story all the time being careful about the message the story might leave on her young mind.
She loves listening to 'smart' stories which per her definition is when the central character in the story displays intelligence or presence of mind to tide over a situation to mark the logical end of a story.
I am already worried that her questions and inquisitiveness will very soon catch me on the wrong foot and my 24 years of tight rope education and grooming will look ordinary. I hope Google will rescue me like it has on numerous occasions. I also hope to never lose my patience and yell at her chiding her to study or go to bed.
The more i think about it, i only end up introspecting. I now realize i never studied anything expecting one day my daughter would come to me for answers. At least -so far she thinks her daddy knows and can do everything on the earth. All along i studied to pass exams, to beat someone or to ape another one. Introspecting today, i feel all the jargon and all that cutting edge stuff i learnt at various stages, sharpened and honed skills are of no use when i cannot engage her for 10 minutes with a captivating story..
Work pressures, meetings, time lines, managers, deliveries and reports all seem trivial when compared to this challenge that i am confronted these days. During my days at school, no one talked of 'Right brained' or 'Left brained' – One was either Brainy or woefully 'Bird Brained', This was around the time when Roger Sperry received a Nobel in medicine for this work on the roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain viz. "creative and artistic" and "cognitively skilled" . Right brained pursuits are certainly acknowledged and sought after these days -probably the reason; many of my daughter's friends are into dance, art, music lessons at the age of 4!
Storytelling is helping my daughter learn to draw clearly from her own spoken narrative (not yet sure whether my stories are making an impact yet- My wife certainly has more time and patience). Storytelling surely is giving her ideas for expressing herself in a format which is clear, crisp and honest
....And as for me, i am on a mission to ensure my daughter turns out smarter and just about "right brained"
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