Starting to Believe

Last night, Logan received an Outstanding Arts Award from the Connecticut Association of Schools for his automotive design drawings.

How did this happen? This year, at his new high school in the Quiet Corner of Connecticut, Logan is taking AP Drawing, along with Ceramics and Sculpture, plus all those required academic classes. His drawing teacher pushes him, challenges him, holds him accountable, and he’s developing his talent. (Check out his portfolio at NLoganWinkler.com.) In fact, he got a scholarship to study Industrial Design at the Shintaro Akatsu School Of Design next year, part of the University of Bridgeport. Yeah, college. And this is the kid who almost quit school in fifth grade. The young man who scraped through high school with Cs and Ds until this year. Now he’s on the honor roll. What happened?

Logan explains it in an essay (He writes essays now. Yes!) The EXPLO summer program was a big part of it. The classwork and homework there didn’t require reading and writing, just thinking and doing, so he forgot he was dyslexic. He was a good student, and he enjoyed school! Then he decided he wasn’t going to let the downsides of dyslexia define him anymore. He stopped avoiding the writing assignments at school, and started blitzing them. Creative Writing was his highest grade last fall (thanks to his amazing teacher). Everything snowballed. Now here we are.

In dramatic, fictional stories, everything turns on a dime, a single moment of climax. In real life, it’s a much longer process. Years of just keeping Logan moving forward, muscling through the weeds, has led to this tipping point, when he’s really starting to believe what we’ve been telling him all along: “You can do great things. You can do things that nobody else can do. Do them.”

Finally, like Neo in this clip of The Matrix, “He’s beginning to believe” in his nascent superpowers.