With schools now conducting ‘remote learning,’ many parents are setting up designated study areas for their children at home. It’s a thing.
Before COVID-19, children did their homework after school, squeezing time for it around sports practice, dinner, and other activities. They studied on a couch, on their bed, at the dinner table after the meal, wherever they could.
(Hold on, wait a minute. At this point you’re wondering why I’m writing about this topic. Isn’t this blog mostly about writing fiction? Yes, and this post is about that, too. Be patient. I’ll get to it.)
Where was I? Oh, yes. As a perceptive viewer of social trends, I’ve picked up on a change. With schoolchildren now home during school hours, linked to their teachers by computer, they need their own assigned study nook at home. In short, they need their own desk.
When I was a kid, I had my own desk. It stood in the basement, separate from the rest of the house, in a quiet area. I didn’t think much about it then, but that desk shaped my life.
There’s enormous symbolic power in a desk. First, it’s yours. It’s a horizontal surface on which you move things about, allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand while other tasks wait. You’re the general, strategically deploying your forces by your command.
Also, it’s got formality of purpose. That is, it claims to the world that this place, and no other, is where you study. That’s all you do there, and you don’t study elsewhere. It’s not some dual-use, multi-function furniture item. When you’re not studying there, you won’t be eating dinner off your desk or sleeping on it. It’s designed and optimized for one activity—studying.
Studying, of course, begins to look a lot like work. We even call it homework or schoolwork.
All the while, the desk is shaping you. You’re forming and ingraining a habit, making a mental link between a place and an activity. The desk is telling you studying is serious. Things you do at a desk are solemn, adult-like things. A desk is a place of the mind, a place to work, a place to create.
A desk is not just a tiny niche within the universe. It is its own universe. Yours.
I think the current push to provide children their own study desk could be a positive trend. And not just to help them do better in schoolwork.
The more people who become used to working creatively at their desk, the more inclined some will be to write fiction. The Desk Generation may end up providing humanity with some of history’s best novelists.
Sit down, children. Your desk awaits you. Your future lies ahead. Write well, even better than—
Poseidon’s Scribe
