What's the deal with writing anyway?

Exploring the history and premise of the written word

Words. All day, We’re writing, thinking, reading, saying them. Wearing them, following them, believing them, doubting them, mixing them up and sometimes eating them. Every once in a while, it feels important to step back and consider them.

This happy is edible. Or the word is anyway.

What’s the deal with writing anyway?

This fall, my class has been studying the entire premise of written language. We’ve explored how pictures became pictographs became characters and letters. We made our own cave art under a bridge in a park using air dry clay, water and Crisco. We played with cuneiform, making our own clay tablets (one kid says she’s burying hers in the yard for posterity). We looked at ideograms and emojis. We learned how to write Mayan numerals, which are both simpler than our system and kind of a brain teaser (they use base 20). We had amazing lessons about Tamil and Mandarin and Japanese writing systems from parents. (Did you know that the Mandarin word for “gecko” is made of characters that literally mean “wall tiger”?) A friend of a friend of my assistant teacher came in and, in an hour and a half of enthusiasm, showed my students how to write the entire Arabic alphabet as well as to introduce ourselves in Arabic. We played with comics as a way to combine words and pictures. We’re headed towards learning about the evolution of the Roman alphabet, touching in on things like how j and i used to be the same letter, and doing some handwriting work on the way. It’s been a nerdy, playful adventure.

But for most of human history, and even recently in many cultures, humans have not used writing. Even in cultures with writing, not everyone is literate. (There are several states in the US today where the functional illiteracy rate is nearly 30%.)

Writing has a complicated history, right back to the earliest poet whose name we still know, the Sumerian priestess Enheduana (whose poems we studied this fall), whose dad had perhaps the first empire we know about.

So as part of looking at writing, it feels important to look at not-writing.

Family Oral Histories: Grandpa’s grandpa

This week, we veered into looking at oral record keeping. Every year at Thanksgiving, I ask students to talk to their relatives and get a family story. This year, I asked them to ask someone (grandparents were extra cool) to tell a story about their own grandparents. Then I have the kids tell those stories in class. Most families keep their history orally, and I want students to get in the habit of inviting family stories. We’ve only heard some, but so far we learned about a grandpa who lit a trashcan full of tumbleweeds on fire, another grandpa aptly known as “Nubs” who cut off the tips of his fingers with a saw and burned off his eyebrows lighting wood finish on fire. We heard about a grandpa who had, then sold off, a ticket on the Titanic. We also heard about some grandmas and a lot of cats.

Community Oral Histories: Winter Count

Then, using this stellar curriculum unit from Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, we learned about Winter Counts. A winter count is a mnemonic device used by Sioux tribes and others to keep track of a community’s history. Each winter, a new symbol is added to the count, which might be drawn on a hide or cloth or paper. The symbol marks a big event of the year, and helps people keep stories in place. A person who doesn’t know the community’s stories could only make a guess at what each symbol means. Its full meaning relies on the memories of humans.

Lone Dog’s Winter Count, the Yanktonais Nakota winter count that we studied. It marks the years 1800-1871

After learning about winter counts, we made our own personal ones. Some students did a symbol for every day that week, some for every month that year, some for every year of their lives. One student (and I mention this because I think it was one of the most successful of the winter counts we made) made a symbol for each significant event that had happened in the last year, some months having more than one.

The winter counts students made were beautiful, but they became even more rich when I asked them to tell me the stories of each symbol.

This is true even of written words, that there is much more referenced by them than they could hold in isolation from human minds. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.