My Response to Le Guin's "Operating Instructions"

“Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.” (Brain Pickings, Maria Popova) This is an affirmation of the the writing of Le Guin’s “The Operating Instructions”. In her writing about words, Le Guin writes, “Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on”. This is a very strong statement to show the link between imagination and words. Words are needed to express one’s imagination and bring it to life. “The Operating Instructions” is a wonderful read which explores the question of art, storytelling, freedom and dignity.

In her work, Le Guin writes about children being taught to “co hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it”.  This draws me back to my homeland where we have what are called African folktales, stories passed across too children by word of mouth, usually at the evening time when the moon is out ( which is why it is commonly called “Tales by moonlight”). As children, we are made to understand that all of these folktales are true life stories and that if we don’t learn a lesson from these stories, it might lead to serious consequences. But, as we grow, we come to understand that they are all fiction, told to teach us about our culture, values, and also how to grow to be a more successful and better person.

As a young child, I remember imagining and creating stories in my head, and that widened my imagination. I began to think beyond the stories and created new ideas, imagining what the future would be like. Thus, I can completely relate to one of the statements in Le Guin’s work where she writes, “their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs”. I believe that imagination is a key to every innovation that has been made in the past and present. For instance, Benjamin Franklin came up with an idea that electricity had positive and negative elements and also experimented with a kite to prove his ideas. Franklin’s ideas motivated others scientists to study electricity and eventually, Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, and our world has been brighter ever since. As a result of the imagination of some people, who dared to turn what some thought were absurd ideas, into reality, electricity was discovered. Every technology and invention are due to imagination.

The dictionary meaning of Imagination is:

·         The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

·         The ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.

Thus, Imagination allows one to be creative. It leads to elaborate theories, dreams and inventions in any profession, including education. Le Guin observes that like a tool, imagination requires that we first learn how to use it, and that storytelling and reading books serve as the sandbox in which we turn imagination into reality. If I could have a discussion with the author, I would want to discuss extensively on this point. School should be a place where children have the opportunity to use their imagination and experiment.

In her writing, Virginia Woolf considered memory as “the seamstress that thread our lives together...but it is our inner storytelling that orders memory into a coherent thread”.  Susan Sontag also says that “if imagination is memorably observed, it can reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.” Our life paths are paved with stories, the story we tell ourselves about what happened to us, why it happened, and how it made us who we are.

I think there’s a lot of benefits of Le Guin’s approach to teaching writing. There’s a strong quote from her writing in which she states, “The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way”. This applies also in the classroom. Young writers do not improve their writing skills simply because teachers require them to write (Englert, 1992). All writing is collaborative, just the same as Le Guin’s idea of “home” being something imaginary not one’s family or house. She says, “Home imagined comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it.....”

I believe learning is not only about reading books, but also the teacher’s ability to lead students to widen their imagination through writing. As an English teacher and a teacher of writing, to be effective is to collaborate with students and create apprenticeships for them through guided practice. Therefore, writing instruction should include explicit teaching in which a teacher steps in to model and prompt, and then steps back to encourage students to make decisions and solve problems through their writing. Effective reading and writing prompts the expansion of students’ oral language skills, and helps them with the application of these competencies to understand and construct texts within a variety of genres.