Return to the Classroom There is this story exercise I do with my Research and Development classes on the first day of class. It is called the Squiggle Exercise. I start by drawing a meaningless squiggle on the board. I then look at the shapes until I can identify the shape of some kind of character. Then I draw in that character.

I draw another squiggle and hand the marker to one of the students. That student finds the character in that shape, creates another abstract shaped squiggle and passes it off to the next student and so on around the class.

At the end of the first phase we have a board full of characters. Then we do a mini biography for each character. And finally we bounce the characters off of each other to see how they react.

There was an Elvis impersonator toucan heading to Los Vegas for an impoersonator contest, a female laming that refused to follow leaders, and a failed specter of death thinking that he failed with Elvis because of all the Elvis impersonators.

Yesterday everything clicked. All the pieces fell into place and at a certain point I could step back, raise my arms, and say to the class we have a story.

The look on their faces when they realized that we did, in fact, have a story and a very good story and that we got it for free out of our unconscious minds was well worth the price of admission.

I called a break right after this exercise, I know enough about teaching to know that you can`t top that kind of thing, and all the students stayed in their seats talking about the story, fleshing it out. I watched them for a little bit, smiled to myself, and then headed out to the room of rest.



  ¶ 5:52 AM