Sunday, December 24, 2017

Learning to Play the Game

Learning to Play the Game
by Jonathan Kohlmeier

Always great to receive suggestions for books, especially when it is a book written by the son of a person I know (my financial advisor).   His son suffers from Selective Mutism (a condition related to severe anxiety).  For his senior year high school project, Jonathan Kohlmeier decides that his culminating project will be to capture his life’s challenge in Learning to Play the Game.  Jon switches schools at the end of middle school and continues at the same institution through his high school years.  He does an outstanding job of capturing the emotions, feelings and thoughts related to his condition and how he begins to think about working through it.  After years of experience in an elementary school in which he and his parents have to fight with the school district, they finally find a small school that meets Jon’s needs.  Jon’s story provides great insight to what it means to feel alone, scared, and frustrated while being unable to name those emotions.  Luckily, he finds some teachers and eventually some friends that make comfortable enough to be himself.  High school students can be really brutal, but, through theatre, hard work, and loving teachers, he is able to succeed.  Congrats on writing your first journey book.  I’m sure there are many more books to be written – go out and do it!  

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