Writer's Block: Cheese doodle?
Oct. 11th, 2010 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I've never doodled so much as outright drawn. It's very seldom you'll find me sketching hearts or stars or filling in the loops of printed letters. Instead, I'll be composing small cartoons in the margins. In elementary school, I scarcely ever turned in a paper without visual accompaniment in the margins, "illustrations" for stories and even grammar homework. In Social Studies I would draw people in cultural or historical costume relevant to the topic. In Science, I would draw relevant animals, rocks, or chemists at work. In foreign language classes I included drew people having conversations, their speech bubbles demonstrating new phrases or grammar. Even in college I drew references I could associate with abstract ideas, like filling my notes on somatoform disorders in Abnormal Psychology with images of a character in one of my stories who had one.
Each year my teachers would warn me that doodling on my homework "won't be acceptable in 4th grade/5th grade/6th grade/middle school" but it never was a problem (in fact, most of my teachers thought it was charming) until my 8th grade exploratory Japanese class. Like many teachers trying to teach organizational skills*, my Japanese teacher (who would later be my Japanese teacher in high school) had a notebook check, but one of her criteria was that there could be no doodles. However, I missed the first week of her course due to my burst appendix and never got the rubric she handed out, so of course I doodled away and she tried to fail my midterm notebook check. I was able to prove I had never gotten the rubric so she let me off the hook so long as I didn't doodle anymore, but it really irritated me that I had to stop and that doodles were considered a negative thing in the first place.
The common belief regarding doodling is it a distraction or a sign of daydreaming; students doodle when they are not paying attention. Maybe that's the case for some people, but that's never been the case for me. I mean, consider the nature of my doodles and how they always reference the subject matter being studied; I have always doodled to reinforce what I am learning. I find I concentrate better when I doodle. I've long understood myself to be predominantly an auditory learner, so I don't need to be looking at you to process what you are teaching; I just need to be able to hear you. And if I can supplement my vision with images that reinforce what I am hearing, invoking secondary visual and kinesthetic cues, all the better. It's when I put down my pen, look up, and stare at you with my eyes glazed over that you've lost me. (But I look like I'm paying attention . . . ?). That's when I've really zoned out.
Knowing my own relationship with doodling, I certainly won't be having a no-doodling policy in my someday-class. I much preferred my student teaching cooperating teacher's method of encouraging students to adorn their notes with colorful pictures and associate kana and kanji with images to help them remember. (Especially since for one reason or another, most students of Japanese tend to be fairly artistic and right-brained individuals). If a student is struggling I'll suggest an experiment to ensure the doodling isn't serving as a distraction, but if it doesn't affect their work I'd prefer to let them carry on.
But the condemnation of doodling is only one of the vast number of things I experienced during my education that I don't see the point in when it comes to my own teaching and management. At the time I wondered if maybe my teachers knew something I didn't, that there was some deeper meaning or method to the madness that I would come to understand when I was an adult or a teacher myself, but I've done teacher training, I've done student teaching, I've served a year in a classroom, and I still don't understand the point of:
Forbidding students to talk during lunch or part of lunch. One of the few parts of the day students have free leave to talk to their friends, and you're going to shit on it? While the students just bottle up their energy even more? Well, it's your funeral . . .
Ceremony over substance. Why are we wasting time practicing sitting and standing in unison for an assembly when we could, I dunno, be catching up on the math skills deficit?
Forbidding students to personalize what is essential their personal property. With the exception of offensive or distracting content (like if your pencil case has a strobe light, maybe?), what's wrong with some bare-bones self-expression? While I can understand the benefits to some aspects of conformity, like uniforms, I don't see how forbidding the students to doodle or add stickers to the covers of their personal notebooks, planners, etc disrupts their education or enforces social hierarchy.
Demanding students sit in rigid posture. This sort of goes along with ceremony over substance, because while I can understand enforcing "in your seat and looking at the teacher" for the sake of management in the elementary school levels, if it's not during a period of explicit instruction why can't the students sit how they want? A student with ADHD conducts herself for your entire boring lecture and you reward her by demanding she stay in that same position even though the need to concentrate is over? How cruel is that? I dunno, I am a big proponent of allowing students to choose comfortable environments in which to work when it is free work time, even at the high school level, even if their only options are to choose floor vs. desk or sitting forward in desk vs. sitting backwards in desk. Maybe it's because I work better when I feel comfortable, too.
Discouraging or forbidding students to work ahead or take on additional tasks beyond the class curriculum. Now, I do understand this-- it's easier if all the students share the exact same amount of prior knowledge for each lesson-- but I still condemn it: it shows far more concern for the convenience of the teacher than the good of the students. (Basically, it's lazy). Right now American schools are moving towards all-inclusive classrooms in which students from both ends of the IQ bell curve, every form of intelligence, and all manner of learning difference will be taught under the same curriculum by the same teachers, and so for better or for worse teachers have to be prepared to handle students of a variety of levels-- and let me tell you, you are not "prepared" if you think you can just teach to the slowest common denominator while the more precocious students wait patiently to move on.* If a student is completing their work and wants to work ahead or supplement their education with material not in the curriculum-- rather than put their gifted mind towards other things like disrupting the class or endangering the community-- I think you'd be an idiot not to let them.
And there's probably a lot more to that, but that's what I can think of right now.
I've never doodled so much as outright drawn. It's very seldom you'll find me sketching hearts or stars or filling in the loops of printed letters. Instead, I'll be composing small cartoons in the margins. In elementary school, I scarcely ever turned in a paper without visual accompaniment in the margins, "illustrations" for stories and even grammar homework. In Social Studies I would draw people in cultural or historical costume relevant to the topic. In Science, I would draw relevant animals, rocks, or chemists at work. In foreign language classes I included drew people having conversations, their speech bubbles demonstrating new phrases or grammar. Even in college I drew references I could associate with abstract ideas, like filling my notes on somatoform disorders in Abnormal Psychology with images of a character in one of my stories who had one.
Each year my teachers would warn me that doodling on my homework "won't be acceptable in 4th grade/5th grade/6th grade/middle school" but it never was a problem (in fact, most of my teachers thought it was charming) until my 8th grade exploratory Japanese class. Like many teachers trying to teach organizational skills*, my Japanese teacher (who would later be my Japanese teacher in high school) had a notebook check, but one of her criteria was that there could be no doodles. However, I missed the first week of her course due to my burst appendix and never got the rubric she handed out, so of course I doodled away and she tried to fail my midterm notebook check. I was able to prove I had never gotten the rubric so she let me off the hook so long as I didn't doodle anymore, but it really irritated me that I had to stop and that doodles were considered a negative thing in the first place.
*Teachers' attempts to teach organizational skills, note-taking, and other positive study habits by setting up what I saw as invasive rules (regarding MY planner or MY notebooks) usually did not sit well with me. As a teacher I understand why they did what they did and how it might have benefited some of the students, and luckily most of my teachers would leave me alone to do my thing once I proved myself to be organized with or without their system-- but I was endlessly aggravated by the teachers that insisted on inflicting their system on me when I already had one in place that worked well, if not even better, for me.
The common belief regarding doodling is it a distraction or a sign of daydreaming; students doodle when they are not paying attention. Maybe that's the case for some people, but that's never been the case for me. I mean, consider the nature of my doodles and how they always reference the subject matter being studied; I have always doodled to reinforce what I am learning. I find I concentrate better when I doodle. I've long understood myself to be predominantly an auditory learner, so I don't need to be looking at you to process what you are teaching; I just need to be able to hear you. And if I can supplement my vision with images that reinforce what I am hearing, invoking secondary visual and kinesthetic cues, all the better. It's when I put down my pen, look up, and stare at you with my eyes glazed over that you've lost me. (But I look like I'm paying attention . . . ?). That's when I've really zoned out.
Knowing my own relationship with doodling, I certainly won't be having a no-doodling policy in my someday-class. I much preferred my student teaching cooperating teacher's method of encouraging students to adorn their notes with colorful pictures and associate kana and kanji with images to help them remember. (Especially since for one reason or another, most students of Japanese tend to be fairly artistic and right-brained individuals). If a student is struggling I'll suggest an experiment to ensure the doodling isn't serving as a distraction, but if it doesn't affect their work I'd prefer to let them carry on.
But the condemnation of doodling is only one of the vast number of things I experienced during my education that I don't see the point in when it comes to my own teaching and management. At the time I wondered if maybe my teachers knew something I didn't, that there was some deeper meaning or method to the madness that I would come to understand when I was an adult or a teacher myself, but I've done teacher training, I've done student teaching, I've served a year in a classroom, and I still don't understand the point of:
Forbidding students to talk during lunch or part of lunch. One of the few parts of the day students have free leave to talk to their friends, and you're going to shit on it? While the students just bottle up their energy even more? Well, it's your funeral . . .
Ceremony over substance. Why are we wasting time practicing sitting and standing in unison for an assembly when we could, I dunno, be catching up on the math skills deficit?
Forbidding students to personalize what is essential their personal property. With the exception of offensive or distracting content (like if your pencil case has a strobe light, maybe?), what's wrong with some bare-bones self-expression? While I can understand the benefits to some aspects of conformity, like uniforms, I don't see how forbidding the students to doodle or add stickers to the covers of their personal notebooks, planners, etc disrupts their education or enforces social hierarchy.
Demanding students sit in rigid posture. This sort of goes along with ceremony over substance, because while I can understand enforcing "in your seat and looking at the teacher" for the sake of management in the elementary school levels, if it's not during a period of explicit instruction why can't the students sit how they want? A student with ADHD conducts herself for your entire boring lecture and you reward her by demanding she stay in that same position even though the need to concentrate is over? How cruel is that? I dunno, I am a big proponent of allowing students to choose comfortable environments in which to work when it is free work time, even at the high school level, even if their only options are to choose floor vs. desk or sitting forward in desk vs. sitting backwards in desk. Maybe it's because I work better when I feel comfortable, too.
Discouraging or forbidding students to work ahead or take on additional tasks beyond the class curriculum. Now, I do understand this-- it's easier if all the students share the exact same amount of prior knowledge for each lesson-- but I still condemn it: it shows far more concern for the convenience of the teacher than the good of the students. (Basically, it's lazy). Right now American schools are moving towards all-inclusive classrooms in which students from both ends of the IQ bell curve, every form of intelligence, and all manner of learning difference will be taught under the same curriculum by the same teachers, and so for better or for worse teachers have to be prepared to handle students of a variety of levels-- and let me tell you, you are not "prepared" if you think you can just teach to the slowest common denominator while the more precocious students wait patiently to move on.* If a student is completing their work and wants to work ahead or supplement their education with material not in the curriculum-- rather than put their gifted mind towards other things like disrupting the class or endangering the community-- I think you'd be an idiot not to let them.
*Bored kids can do some pretty crazy stuff, and the smarter the bored kid, the more ridiculous and even sinister that crazy stuff can get. For example, my French exchange student brother Alexandre, who hacked his school computer network to have all the computers in the school pop out their disk drives simultaneously. (Yes, he apparently had the time for that). Or my dad and his napalm incident. Or some boys my sister knows who made some sort of ambiguous-looking mechanical device and abandoned it in a lake, which resulted in a bomb squad getting called. BORED KIDS ARE DISRUPTIVE. And sometimes dangerous!
And there's probably a lot more to that, but that's what I can think of right now.
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Date: 2010-10-13 01:37 pm (UTC)To be fair, I think you were in the vast minority of students whose doodles were actually *relevant to the lesson*. But that doesn't mean the other margin notes and doodling are bad. I like making lists in the margins, of stuff I need to do, things I need to remember, which homework I plan on doing when, etc. Or sometimes I make random doodles or pictures (I was never very good at drawing, so they'd be simple). But I'd usually do these things when I was tired, and sitting and listening isn't always the best when tired. So atleast it would get my mind turning and focused on something, so I'd be less likely to stare glazed-eyed and not absorbing anything (though look like I am). :P