Leslie Norris, Welsh poet and teacher and long-time resident poet at my university, often described activities his primary school teacher designed to open the children’s minds to sensory experience. Norris’s teacher had students cut a small square from a piece of paper and use the frame to look at objects inside or outside the classroom. Gazing through this window, students learned to focus their attention. Another time, during a windstorm, this teacher took the students outside to hold their arms one-by-one around a large tree in front of the school house. Cheeks against the bark, they each felt the wind humming through the leaves, twigs, and branches.
Class-bound writing teachers have the difficult assignment of helping students see differently inside a building, which is an unnatural construction of time and space, and inside an educational system, where everything is already seen and which makes the act of “seeing” a specialized or unnatural act. In “Loss of the Object” Walker Percy compares someone walking along a beach and finding a dead fish to a student dissecting a fish in a laboratory class. He writes, “A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented.” The difficulty is caused by “a whole ensemble of relations which exist between the student” and the object of learning, relations which are mostly invisible. In this environment each student “waives his sovereign rights as a person and accepts his role of consumer as the highest estate to which [he] can aspire.” This system can be disrupted by exercises which prompt the students to reflect on their own sovereignty.
One exercise Norris developed, which can be used in any classroom or in any outdoor setting where students can sit and write, was to have students describe each other face-to-face. Students look at each other’s faces all the time; faces are familiar. But staring at a relative stranger’s face from close range over an extended period of time is unconventional. Having students describe their classmates’ faces throws them off, makes them slightly uncomfortable, and urges them toward a novel experience. Suddenly opposite the student writer is a live face, one which resists the violence of reductive and clichéd description, in part because the face is staring intently back, describing back. This important writing act asks for care and effort.
Norris divided beginning creative writing students into pairs, having them orient their desks so that the pairs faced each other. He asked them to describe the other person’s face on a paper that could be turned in. He gave them rules: 1) no names on the papers; 2) no metaphorical description (in this one exercise students should try to describe what they see, unfiltered by metaphorical language); 3) students should list ten items, which can be sentences, phrases, or even single words; and 4) give-away descriptions such as gender, hair color or style, presence of eye glasses, and specific jewelry are not legal to use.
After the writing exercise the pairs pass in their papers (or in an outdoor setting, their open journals) and the teacher reads one of the descriptions out loud, while the class tries to guess who is being described. After hearing three or four exercises, the class discusses what they learned about themselves and about writing through the exercise. Discussions can involve the nature of communication, personal boundaries, cultural norms, metaphor and perception, and the difficulty of finding fresh or untrammeled language.
This exercise helps students practice precision in close observation and descriptive writing. It also sensitizes them to metaphor, and helps them see the cultural context of the writing act, in this case the conventions concerning staring and intimate space. If used early in the class, the exercise also helps students know each other and see each other as distinct individuals.
For more information click Journaling Exercises or Journaling Bibliography.