Ice cream.

Last week, I made up a new batch of music flash cards for my younger students. I drew cards for all the usual stuff: quavers, semibreves, crotchet rests, treble clefs, various notes on the stave. Then, on one of the cards I drew an icecream, a yellow cone with a pink scoop and blue sprinkles. I don't even really know why I did it; it was just a random moment of whimsy to surprise the kids, I guess.

This week I've been trialling the new cards and the kids have been enjoying it. Anything that's a bit new is a little surprise all of its own. But the first time I took one of my students through the new flashcards, I was the one who was surprised. "Minim," my little student said. "Bass clef. Mezzo forte. Ice cream. Middle C." She just sailed right on by the ice cream cone without skipping a beat.

She wasn't the only one. It's happened with every single student so far. Some of them grin. Some of them laugh a little as they speak the word. But not one of them blinks when the unexpected thing appears. That to me is itself unexpected, and it's delightful.

I think this probably wouldn't happen with adults. I think that, if I showed the flashcards to my friends, they'd say, "Why'd you put the ice cream in there? What's that got to do with anything?" At the very least, they might say, "Ice cream?" with their voice sliding up on the end to suggest the question. Not the emphatic and certain "Ice cream" I've heard from each of the kids.

It feels like there's a metaphor in there somewhere. Something about hope or miracles or even having the faith of a little child. Something about not yet being so programmed to think that everything must make sense, that there must be a proper order for everything.

But I'm just gonna let it sit and simmer for a while. And I'll keep grinning as the little ones go through their music terminology and without skipping a beat shout out "Icecream!" every time.

The day of wreckening.

I would say I'm sorry for the terrible pun up there in the post title, only I'm not. Bad puns make the world a better place. So, too, do bad art projects.

I say 'bad' not because there is some inherent morality attached to the Wreck This Journal project I've been doing with my students, but because discussions of art are so often about good art versus bad art, about achievement versus failure. The 'good' or 'bad' of art is generally a question of quality or aesthetic value, and it finds its meaning in the finished work of the piece. Of course, in reality, the meaning is also ascribed to (or taken away from) the art mostly by its observers and critics. It has meaning and value to the artist who lovingly (or angrily or frustratedly or carelessly) laboured over it, but it gains its social and artistic value primarily from others.

For nearly two years, my students and I have been working on wrecking our own journals. It's not something we do every week or have a fixed timeframe for working on; we pull them out if the more typical school business of English and history are done, or if we need an injection of randomness in our day. Using Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal as a guide, we'll flip to a page and then follow its (sometimes bizarre or vaguely uncomfortable) instructions in our own tacky exercise books. Sometimes we come across a page we've already done, and we challenge each other to complete the same exercise again, but differently.

I think I've mentioned before that the kids were wary of the journal-wrecking approach when we first started. I heard a lot of "Am I really allowed to do this?" followed by, "But what if it looks lame?" These days, they are wrecking pros. They will smear glue all over a page without a second thought. They will substitute an "ugly" piece of paper when the "pretty" ones are all gone. They will scribble madly over something already completed. And each time we add another half-dozen pages to our books, we look at the fat, awkward, warped shape of the volume with satisfaction.

The coolest part of the Wreck This Journal project is that the emphasis falls more heavily on process than on results. There are very few realms of life in which this happens. Results are what we find important, and we tailor our processes in order to achieve optimal results. It doesn't work like that with Wreck This Journal -- the creative play is the end goal; perfection is off-limits -- and if the result is something that makes us wrinkle our nose, we shrug and move along. Working to achieve something is healthy and good. But sometimes it is just as healthy to play and make for the joy of playing and making, entirely divorcing the process from the results.

Which could be kind of a metaphor for childhood or something, if only I wasn't too hungry to really sit down and think it through.

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Conversations:

• Asea -- yes! That's the copy of Winter Book that you sent me! I figured that this cold season was the perfect time to pull it out again. I love revisiting books seasonally :)
• Emily Dempster -- your life sounds so full and happy right now! I'm delighting with you in all the cool stuff that's going on!

Still wrecking these journals:

Sometimes biting the bullet means doing the thing to 70% of standard because if you waited till you had the time and energy to do it to 100%, well it would never happen at all. I'm talking about the dodgy pictures here, taken in haste and in low light. But this could also be a metaphor for the very idea that the Wreck This Journal project fosters. Sometimes the quest for perfection (in creativity, in art, in craft, in relationships, in work, in life) can be so powerful that it completely paralyses the doer. Waiting until ability and passion reach full capacity before beginning is like the perfect recipe for unachievement, for non-doing.

I think that's the intrigue of Wreck This Journal. By blatantly ignoring perfection, you're set free to start. Right now. With anything. Free from expectations.

I'm still working on the Wreck This Journal project with my eleven-year-old students, and if possible we are having even more fun than before. Originally, we'd flip open to a random page and do whatever the instructions told us to, but we found that this method was kind of conducive to cheating. If one of the kids came to an instruction that didn't seem appealing, they'd discard it. Now we're going at it again, one page at a time, in order -- and that way we're forced to do even the pages that weird us out ("Chew the page? WHAT."). I love seeing the kids' incredulous faces when I read out the latest instruction: "Really?" Last week found us tying string around the spines of our books and swinging them through the air and into walls. There was complete disbelief followed quickly by giggles -- which pretty sums up the whole project. Plus, it's a fresh way to try new things and save precious pieces of ephemera like birthday gift wrap, picture book illustrations, and treasures scavenged from outside.

Like falling off a (b)log.

I just complained to my mother -- whose dining table I am sitting at right now -- that it feels like so long since I've blogged that I've actually forgotten how to do it. She replied, "I'm sure it's just like falling off a log." Thank you, Mum, for your oh-so-convenient post title inspiration.

It's the Christmas end of the year; the warm end, the sunny end, the end that is packed full with plans and dates and shopping and hopes for tying up all the loose threads of the dreams that were anticipated at the beginning of the year and now stand won, lost, fulfilled, or forgotten. Last week at the grocery store, I bought peaches. Today, I bought apricots. Stonefruit packing the shelves and Jingle Bells playing over the radio: just another sign of approaching Christmas.

Last night, we sat among twinkle lights and sailor's knots and, if we were artists of some kind, tried to embody the hope of what Christmas means by exploring it in some form of creation. If we were the recipients of that art, we tried to lay hold of what the artist was doing, what the artist in all of us is doing whenever we try to look past the dirty glass of the temporal and see the lasting thing that is hidden just beyond it. I was privileged to have some of my short fiction read publicly for the first time ever and, contrary to expectations, I didn't die of awkwardness while I sat there and listened. Rather, I felt the honour of seeing words I had chewed over, crossed and uncrossed, come to life in another person's voice and inflection and lovely enthusiasm. It was pretty special.

One of my little students enlisted my help to write out his Christmas list a few weeks ago. He didn't need my help determining what should go on the list; he just needed some pointers on how each item was spelt. He had all the big guns up there -- the latest branded toys I can't remember the names of, a Wii (or whatever the newest version of a Wii is), stuff like that -- and when he felt happy with the list, he pushed it forward on the table and left it there as a sort of offering for all of us to approve. I had already moved on to something else and was marking the work of another student. The little guy glanced at my hand moving over the page, and snatched his list back. "What are those pens called that are actually pencils and they click the lead out?" he asked, looking at the one in my hand. "Pacers," I said. He licked his bottom lip and picked up his pencil again. "How do you spell pacer?"

Another student was filling time while her sister had a piano lesson. From across the room, she interrupted a song to ask, "How do you draw a major?"
"Like, C major or A major? Like in music?" I asked.
"No!" she said.
"Like, in the army?" I offered. "A general or a captain or a major?"
"No," she said, getting frustrated. "Like, away in a major."
"Oh, that. Right. Yeah, that's called a manger."
"Okay. Can you show me how to draw one?"

Wreck This Journal Redux

I haven't written much here about my teaching work, a one-day-a-week job trying to infuse some English and history into the lives of four local tweens and teens. Since there's only so much reading and writing three non-bookish guys can handle, I try to stick to about four hours of formalised schoolwork, and then some more relaxed projects -- or even a trip to the skate park.

For ten-year-old F though, my lone bookish girl buddy, no amount of work is too much. So I've been sharing with her my copy of Wreck This Journal (introduced here and here) and we've used it as a launching pad to create our own wrecked journals in cheap, endearing composition books. It's a non-compulsory part of the school experience, so at first F was the only one to really take the bait. "Wreck a journal?" she said, her eyes huge and gleaming. But when we flipped open to a random page and attempted to follow its instructions ("Give this page to a friend. Ask them to do something destructive to it. Don't watch"), the boys were intrigued -- and more than willing to assist us in our destruction. Although only one of the boys has succumbed to the temptation and insisted on his own journal, it's become a process that the others are actively interested in. They actually fight to pick a page from the source book and challenge us to obey whatever it says.

One of the best parts of all is the fact that there are no rules, which means we have to scour our imaginations for our own creative interpretation of the instructions. When I brought along a recent copy of Frankie to cut up and use in collages, F was aghast. "I can't cut up your beautiful magazine!" she said, "That'll ruin it!" I assured her that this was exactly the idea. Even cooler, the fact that we aren't striving for a certain standard of perfection means that no page is "right" or "wrong". If this was a worldview, it'd be dangerous. In learning to boldly try new things with paper and paint, however, it's just fun and a grand challenge.

[Brilliance of brilliance: the folks at Penguin have released a teacher's guide for exploring Wreck This Journal. You can find the downloadable pdf at author Keri Smith's blog.]

Edit: boo! The pictures are all pixely! I don't know how to fix this, but if you click on the images, you can see them in all their hi-res glory.