Doodles

This week my students in Advanced Composition were reading and responding to Lynda Barry's Syllabus. Some really liked it. For some the drawings or freedom or sentiment spoke to them. Some found it confusing, difficult. Some had a hard time reading it, knowing how to deal with the information, or even understand what it was saying and doing.

One student said at the beginning of the semester when they picked up books that they knew  that the Murray Craft of Revision and Syllabus were both for my class without looking.

I have always doodled.

I used to doodle in textbooks, the margins of notebooks. I still doodle during meetings and conferences. It helps me focus. Sometimes it helps me keep my mouth shut. 

Not often.

I am NOT a good drawer. My doodles are stick figures. Laughable stick figures. But in my teaching I use them all the time.

For my high school freshmen I used to draw Tybalt on the bier, then erase him, leave the "Tybalt juice" (always lime green in my Expo markers) and draw Juliet on top of it, as part of a lesson in annotating and illustrating Juliet's fears in Act IV scene 3.

I draw a surprisingly accurate Globe Theatre. The students always laugh when I draw technical drawings because they're good (a holdover from drafting as a master electrician in technical theatre) but I always "ruin" them by then adding stick figures.

But I love doodles. 

It's just how my brain works. When I read plays or texts I annotated and highlight as I read, but then when I go through these to make my notes, either for discussion or to teach, I put them most often in visual form.

Here, as my Shakespeare seminar students held their discussion on The Tempest, I illustrated on the board as they talked.

Then, when we talked about a story from Sycroax's Daughters a couple of weeks later, since we were talking about it as an adaptation of The Tempest, I printed out my board notes and then mapped the story over it.

Then I replicated these notes on the board during class.

In my classes, both high school and college, I am a big fan of visual notes, getting students to doodle, draw, make these types of connections. Not all are fans. Not all create dense pages. Some put a couple of things and call it done. Others really run with it.

I like doing this for a few reasons. I think we don't play enough as a way of thinking through and expressing ideas. I like the idea of challenging my students to think of our material in different ways. Along with play, I think the idea of experimenting is important.

So I doodle in class. I doodle as board notes. I doodle as my notes. I encourage students to doodle.

When I taught high school I often had my students create one page visual notes to represent a module. I also would hand them Expo markers at the end of the year and let them go to town on the whiteboard, to draw out a representation of our semester or year. I've had my college classes create visual notes as module reflections, end of semester reflections. When I saw we're drawing with crayons in class or playing with blocks I mean it.

Whether or not doodles are involved my boards notes tend to be very visual. I change colors, there are shapes. I encourage students to take pictures of board notes and a lot do at the end of class.

I joked last week with a senior that they could publish a whole book of my doodles. So I was thinking of all my doodles. I generally have not saved them. I take pictures of board notes myself but never organize them or name them so they are easily found. It took me a while to find the ones shown below and I know I'm missing a bunch. I really wanted to find that Tybalt juice one because I taught Romeo and Juliet several times a year for YEARS and I did that drawing every time.

Alas.

I think I'll be better now about saving them, naming them.

But for now, I just thought I'd share.

https://www.screencast.com/t/50YfhnJE