We’re all lenses into the world; more than that, we construct models of everything around us, creating perspective. Perspective is a unique reality, and why we read novels in the first place–we want to know what it feels like to live a completely different life, to take in information in a radically different way.
Our teachers often catch students at a time in which their perspective of the world is changing.
When we’re 10-14, our perspectives undergo massive reconstruction. We tend to drop many of the illusions we carried through our earliest years and, with a growing sense of self, look for truth on our own. We grow into the person we will be, solidifying our taste in music, literature, people, and places.
Lucky for us teachers, we get to see this process work out on the page through the perspectives/personalities of the characters in our storyteller’s books. We see the different aspects of themselves right there in the story, one mode of thinking pitted against another.
Every one of our students has their own perspective, and the attitudes they’ve carried (and dropped) along the way. Using all these views into the world, they can’t help but write rich characters who seek to find the truth for themselves.