Writing, Sketching, Writing

In my office, I have a bag of leaves.  In mid-September, they were brilliantly colored when I picked them up off the ground.  By afternoon, when I used them in class, they had started to fade.  I had my English 100 students write descriptions.

I thought about having them sketch and then write again--would the writing change?  I didn't have pencils, so I decided to revisit that idea later.

The day after the hurricane, I noticed all the acorns and pine cones on the ground.  I decided to pick them up.  I made sure to pick up enough so that each student could have an object.  When I picked them up, I had no idea it would be so long before I returned to my in-person classes.

This week, I tried an experiment.  On the first day, I had them choose either a pine cone or an acorn off the desk.  They wrote a basic description of the object.  I then had them write a creative type of approach:  write in the voice of the object--what does it have to say to us?

I then made a list of items on the board:  weather related (hurricane, rain), places in nature (mountains, volcanoes), other objects from nature (stone, river).  I had them write again--choose an item from the board and have it speak to your object or create a dialogue.

Then I had them choose six of the most interesting words from all the day's writing and hand them in.  I have created a word list that we'll use next week.  

The next class day, I had them choose the same object from the table.  I had white paper and pencils for them.  We began by drawing the object.

The room was amazingly quiet.  For the first chunk of class time, everyone concentrated on sketching.  And here's what really astonished me:  no one reached for their phones.  It is the only--and I mean the only--time in the class where no one even considered reaching for their phone.

We did a variety of sketches.  My favorite was a variation on an exercise that we did in a seminary class (which I wrote about in a blog post).  I had them divide the paper into 6 squares.  We sketched for 30-40 seconds and then switched squares--quick, quick, quick.

And then I had them write a description of the object again.  I had the students compare the two writings, and we discussed what they saw.  Some of them said they wrote in more detail after sketching.  Some did not.

We talked about the value of doing something else, like sketching, an activity that wasn't going to be part of the grade.  I talked about the value of taking a break from intense studying or writing.

In English 101 class, from October 21-Nov. 1, we're doing a variety of these kinds of approaches, and then students will write an essay about what we did, what they experienced, and analyzing the effectiveness of these activities.  I've done variations of this kind of writing project before, and the writing has been phenomenally better than more "standard" essays.

But more important, watching my students sketch and write helps me feel less exhausted.  It helps me feel like we're doing something post-hurricane to return to normalcy and to affirm the value of writing, sketching, and other endeavors.