Monday, January 10, 2011

Morning Sketching


Some samples, none from my current class: Sherry comes into the classroom ready to make sense right away. Joey is a walking blur for the first half hour. Scott may well have had another argument with his brother in the car on the way to school. Diane would prefer to read, because it’s easy for her—but she’ll agree to sketch, now she’s used to it.

Kids arrive at school in the morning each carrying a different weather inside them, different both child by child and day by day. Sketching time makes a sort of airlock, a way to transition between home and school, a way to transition into output, a way to settle down into the self who chooses what to do, and explores and thinks, and then chooses again.


How it works

I buy 9 by 12 hardbound sketching journals at a place in Cambridge where I can get a special deal, and give them to my students on the first day of school. Right away, that day, we begin something that will become a familiar ritual. Following a note on the marker board and each others’ example, kids settle to sketch at their table places as they gradually assemble, chatting quietly as they’re settling. If they want special materials from the art shelves, they get them during this time. The sketching encourages relaxed discussion around the table (where, after all, not all the table-mates are chosen or familiar.) The chatting helps kids transition into the privacy of their own heads.

Around 8:30, when everyone is supposed to have arrived, we close the classroom door and start the day’s music, and the sketching becomes silent, with no movement around the room. Establishing this routine, and re-establishing it after breaks, I say, “Go down into your own mind, your own imagination. Don’t interrupt anyone else. Just settle in.” Sometimes, drawing on long-ago experience, I think of this as a Quaker meeting for drawing, a kind of meditation. The silent sketching phase lasts for ten or fifteen minutes, and then we start the rest of the day.

Every once in a while, not as often as I wish but as often as a busy schedule can allow, we do a round of sketching sharing as part of morning meeting. Kids call on each other for comments or questions. The questioners ask the sharer, “Where did you get that idea?” or, “How did you get that effect?” If a child shares something produced in a new way, or if I do a little mini-lesson on a new material nobody has discovered yet, the resulting contagion is accepted as a good thing, not spurned as copying.

Although I occasionally wander around the classroom looking over kids’ shoulders, and see whatever they chose to share with the class, I never evaluate what they’re doing, except for an occasional involuntary gasp of amazement. No guidelines; only the rarest of suggestions. They’re on their own.


What we need to get past

For some students sketching time is hard at the beginning of the year. Some fear that I’m asking them to make representational drawings of real objects, but tend to relax as soon as they realize that cartooning is fine; making abstract designs using collaged or stenciled shapes is fine; various kinds of printmaking are fine; maps of fantasy places are fine. (On the other hand, some kids welcome the chance to do—every day, in school!—representational drawing.) Once in a while a particular child judges his own visible products so harshly, so anxiously, that he wants to tear pages out of the book. (I say no; the book is a kind of journal; not all learning experiences are completely positive; that’s okay.)


What I learn from watching

If a teacher’s first job is to know her students, few class experiences help me more than this, especially early in the year. For example: some kids, who show in their other academic work a difficulty committing themselves, will find even in sketching time some format for quiet, repetitive work: filling an entire page with tiny tangent circles, or endlessly drawing the same cartoon. That helps me understand what they’re doing (or not doing) in math, or in writing, or even in trying to settle on a book to read.

Other students set themselves up to make decision after decision, and relish that sense of power. Many behave like adult artists I know, trying variations on a theme, investigating, exploring. “What if I...?”

Whatever energy is there—that’s what we work with, all day.


Memories

Thinking back over years of watching kids at sketching time, I think of the girl processing a messy parent divorce, who, day after day, drew ordinary things and then buried them under a thick layer of black cray-pas, rubbing it glossy. (This didn’t last forever, but it did go on for several months. I knew she was in counseling already; I could just wait and watch and see what she would do next.) I think also of the girl who spent weeks, maybe months, painting watercolor on her own hand and then making designs, on the pages of her sketchbook, with the imprint of her hand. I think of the few boys who’ve drawn almost nothing but weapons and mayhem—very few, actually, although many have used those motifs at times—and then I think of the equal number of boys who’ve made map worlds that extended from page to page for as many as thirty pages.


Why does it work so well?

When I say “it works” I mean that early sketching time has a positive effect on the rest of the day. I don’t know enough about teaching art to advocate morning sketching as a way to do that, although I’m always fascinated by what my students wind up doing in such an open and risk-free environment, with only each other as teachers. Still, I’ve always been focused on the effect that sketching time has on us, students and teacher, as individuals and as a group.

I don’t have much of an experimental control, though, for any claims I might make about the benefit of morning sketching. Since I discovered morning sketching, especially silent sketching, as a way to begin the day, I’ve only rarely left it out. Substitute teachers, coming into my room intermittently, discover that this is a part of my plans they want to follow.

I can’t think of anything with a bigger pay-off, that requires so little from the teacher.

Maybe it’s about the silence itself. Our hearts can say things in silence that we are less likely to say out loud, and those rise into the air of the room, and time carries us all forward. When I look back into the sketchbook I sometimes use myself, joining the kids’ work, I often return to the daffodils I drew when one of my best friends was dying. The kindness of that class—in college now—has become a fragrance for the flowers. I believe this so firmly: what we can give each other in shared experience should be a part of school. But those moments of mutual gift often seem to happen best with the lightest possible touch. As light as shared silence.


Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Writing with young adolescents

To begin, I want you to think of everything you have to do while writing:
  • finding the words for new thoughts
  • spelling the words
  • actually producing the written version of each word, forming each letter, or finding it on a keyboard
  • keeping the first part of the sentence in mind as you head for the later part
  • joining sentences in paragraphs that hold together
  • through all of this, creating a linear pathway through an understanding that may not be linear at all.
That's not everything, of course; there's also grammar, and punctuation, and resolving all the arguments in your head about anything that you start to think about.
Even for adults, writing is one of the most complicated things we do on a regular basis. So it has a big impact, in the evolution of young adolescent writers, that their brains are growing and changing dramatically, exploding with neural connections. That translates into new horsepower--but it's pretty raw horsepower.
I want to focus on two interlocking ways young writers can begin to use that horsepower.
To an increasing degree, they can harness extra selves to the work of writing, by doing it in stages, across a stretch of time. For example, I'm a big fan of both editing for mechanics, and, beyond that, more fundamental revision, not so much for the sake of correctness, but because together those processes of editing and revision give us all—at every age—second and third and fourth chances to figure out what we really mean, and get it written down in a form that a reader can use.
Young adolescents have a new capacity for paying attention to their own products in these ways-- but actually learning the component skills, and the necessary detachment, requires lots of modeling and mentoring; lots of practice; lots of encouragement towards confidence.
Second point: many of the benefits of revision involve extra chances to think about the experience of the reader.
A few kids can do all of that complicated stuff we do while we’re writing, and think about their readers, too, all at the same time, even in first drafts, at amazingly young ages. For some, just by luck, the physical production part of writing is unusually easy. Sometimes, for a particular kid, an unusually clear voice inside her head is perfectly synchronized with the pace at which she can produce written words, and that synchronization lets her lift her head and look around at the idea of an audience.
The experience of sharing writing in class, having actual readers, as they come up through Touchstone classes, helps kids develop this consciousness. But brain growth is a big part of it, too. (For some kinds of growth, it doesn't matter what experiences kids have; they have to get to the place where they're ready in a more basic way.) One way or another, for most kids, I watch them turn this corner toward more consciousness of their readers, somewhere in the journey from 10 to 12; and I often see it first in the process of revising an already existing draft.
[In the live version of this talk, this is where I show the sample piece of writing.]
So what does this new awareness of the reader let a young writer do?
It lets her make sense in new ways—in longer strings of logic, with more of the supporting detail that a reader needs in order to understand, and with a clearer main idea for a reader to carry away.
It gives him new power to control audience reaction without having to stick to familiar gimmicks, familiar formats for funny stories, familiar imitations of what he’s read--in other words, it helps him combine effectiveness and authenticity.
It helps her understand the point of punctuation and capitalization and conventional spelling—all those agreements between writers and readers to make the sharing of written language more efficient and reliable and expressive.
It lets the writing become more memorable and more useful to the writer herself—because she’s being her own first reader, and learning from herself in the process.
Is there a downside to these new capacities for self-awareness and awareness of audience? Of course. Most of us who aren’t young children any more fall over ourselves at times. Life is full of potholes created by self-consciousness.
But that’s an inescapable part of being human--and working with their writing is a very effective, at times almost magical way to help kids accept those selves they see when they're watching themselves. Sitting next to kids and looking at their work with them, I can model habits of self-forgiveness and self-encouragement. I love giving kids permission to appreciate their own writing. It's been good for me, as a writer myself, watching young writers, to feel and share steadily increasing gratitude for our complex, rich, expressive language, and for its power to help us preserve and celebrate life.

Here’s a link to an interview with neuroscientist Jay Giedd about neurological development in young adolescents: