This week’s immaculate renderings are brought to you by Tim Collins, a virtuoso at capturing classroom drama in 30 second pencil likenesses.
Day two of the workshop went considerably smoother as the first day’s butterflies had migrated back home. Or been picked off by a sadistic child with great aim. Whichever.
I brought in a series of open-ended questions to discuss with the class at the start. It acted as a re-introduction, an ice-breaker, and a way for me to practice not lecturing which seems to be a natural tendency. It worked very nicely and got the kids talking and thinking, the perfect mindset with which to dive into writing.
I need to work on how to smoothly transition between their answers and the answers that I want to bring to them though since my tendency was still to lecture after gathering some initial responses. Angie said the questions themselves flowed very well into each other and she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next begun. I’m assuming that’s good.
Another boon was the fact that I actually knew all the kids names this time. I figured it would be an enormous help for my own sense of comfort, but I didn’t realize how helpful it was for drawing out thoughts from the students. Personalization makes everything better.
All in all this class flowed very comfortably. The entire second half was devoted to the students writing the first draft of their stories. Not being able to sit still, I wandered through the class and offered my help. I tried to leave them alone if their eyes and pens were moving at a good clip, concentrating instead on the telltale signs of stagnation - the head tilted back and eyes slightly crossed towards the ceiling, the pen etching repetitive doodling strokes, or the puffed cheeks of disappointment.
This was the most fun. They were much easier to coax into conversation, more apt to voice their concerns (if they had any) and it was easier to help them. The variety of personalities became more apparent, as did the variety of writing styles. Some couldn’t contain themselves to just one page; others had trouble fleshing out more than a paragraph. Some had the typical trouble of how to begin, while others loved beginnings but would falter when confronted with ending and would consequently give up in frustration.
A few particularly interesting things I witnessed:
1. A girl who was able to carry on a conversation while voraciously and steadily writing. She would sit and listen to conversations, giggling and smiling, her head upright and pointed away from her notebook page. Her hand however was moving back and forth, line after line of impeccable penmanship. I was utterly astonished.
2. Another girl - one who had finished both classes early - spent her free time writing simultaneously with both hands. But that’s not all. While writing sentences forward with her right hand, she was writing the same sentences backwards with her right hand!
The effect was as if you wrote with wet ink on the right side of a page, then folded it in vertically in half, and then re-opened the page so the ink from the right hand side bled and created a mirror image onto the left hand side. No wonder she always finished early.
3. Strange moment of the day: one of the students found a hand-written envelope on the couch she was sitting in. It was made out to Sophia, from Monkey. Not the monkey, just Monkey. Inside were two letters, each a clandestine confessional of someone’s liking or disliking of Sophia. Poor Sophia. Unfortunately I never learned Monkey’s own true feelings for Sophia since he was just a messenger. I suspect romantic interest nonetheless.
I must admit, you start growing attached to your students. You start seeing yourself in them. When I mentioned this to my dad he referred to it as “Teacher’s syndrome”. I like to think about it as the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome. The captor growing affinity for the captives.
There are some very creative kids in this group with burgeoning writing talent. The third and final workshop day will be interesting as we’ll be swapping drafts for revision and work on the final versions. In the meantime I’ll have to write my own, the tale of the ninth death of some poor doomed cat.
More next week as this gripping drama concludes…
