Why DulyNoted?

It all began when my mother handed me a pencil and taught me the alphabet, from there it was all down hill.

My handwriting was too small, then it was too large, and now its chicken scratch, I recall at one point someone said “Is that even in English?”

That sentence wholly made me take a step back and say I don't like writing anymore (I am seven here by the way), and had to really think about what it was I wanted to do this recess, so being bored I hit the library.

Literally, the glass doors were so shiny and see through that I hadn't noticed them till my face collided with what was supposed to be the door.

After an embarrassing recovery I trotted on down to the fiction section because no other collection of books in the library ever took my interest.

After awhile I sat myself down with a hard cover book the size of my lap, and read until that ungodly sound coming from the speakers let me know it was time to resume class, which consisted of one dull moment followed by an even duller moment.

It's the third day of grade four and I DO NOT want to go to school for a multitude of reasons, but to my utter surprise mum looks at me, and a decision seems to come over her, so she says “You don't have to if you don't want to sweetheart.”

So I didn't.

And from there my world school path begins to unfold before me, our first month homeschooling we didn't really have a curriculum so we followed the textbooks for our current year in school, but after awhile me and the little brother just weren't learning anything.

So mum turns to me and my brother saying “What do want to learn about?”

I had never been asked this question in my entire existence, so naturally I pondered it for a time, while I was pondering, Jessy pipes up with “Stuff in the sea!”

So that's what we learnt about, by the end of the week my family knew more about bottle nose dolphins than most marine biologists find out in their first year of university.

In that week we delved into the twilight zone of the ocean, the deepest pit in all of the seas, and how it got its name “The Marianas Trench.”

We looked at how Orcas hunt for food, we sought information on that creepy fish from the movie Nemo and why it has a bio luminescent light to lure prey, we also covered bio luminescence because of that little thread.

By the end of the week we had all come to a realisation that information for just about anything was in the palm of our hands.

That led me to read books in my spare time, spare time turned into all the time, all the time turned into every waking moment.

(I'm pretty sure half of the reason why I need glasses is due to how much I read in those few years)

As of now I am currently 12, me, Mum and Jessy are world schooling across states and countries, learning about what we can whenever we can.

During this time at a house sit we were doing in northern NSW, I had just finished my last book and was on the hunt for something to satisfy my boredom.

At the same time Mum was writing on her laptop in bed, looking perplexed but cosy all the same.

So I plop on down next to her and say “Whatchya doinnn?”

Mum replies “I'm writing darling, wanna take a read I'm sort of stuck?”

So she passes me the laptop, and to this day I don't remember what I read, but I do remember what I said with confidence I never knew existed, I said.

“Mum this is all wrong can I write something?”

She smiles says “Sure”

So I spent the next two minutes fixing, I suppose you could say, what my mum had written and by the end of it I pass the laptop back to mum my boredom now satisfied.

She reads it and turns to me with a look of astonishment on her face saying “Sweetheart this is great writing”

Then it all hit me..

I'd found my new pencil.

Reading had given me the skill to write, and over those spans of years reading, I had never once questioned that my vocabulary all of a sudden grew larger by just reading books with big words.

Now that I knew I possessed this skill, I started reading in terms of how could the author have done that better, why did they phrase it this way.

My mind had already been doing that passively from just learning how a page should roll over into the next one.

But now I had a “Mental Direction” I could point towards.

Thanks For Reading

Keigh Klay

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Keep It DulyNoted