Читать книгу Cultivating Curiosity - Doreen Gehry Nelson - Страница 17

The New Skin exercise became personal for me when my step-grandson Jared's other grandmother died and I took him out while his parents made funeral arrangements. We went to see a movie selected by this seven-year-old boy who had a learning disorder and was usually very jumpy, but as we watched the movie, he sat rigid and still. I felt how affected he was by his grandmother's death.

We left the movie and wandered aimlessly through a shopping mall. Tired of it all, I thought of the time Jared had dressed up for Halloween as an Object—a truck costume made by his dad—and I became the educator. I asked Jared, “What if I suddenly turned into my wristwatch?” That hooked him. From then on, I was a wristwatch as he gleefully answered my probing questions about my friends, relatives, my ancestry, enemies, and dreams.

In the Brookstone store, Jared shouted, “Look, there are your relatives!” as he dragged me to see wristwatches, wall clocks, and anything else that ticked or kept time. He explained how each object was like me, but not quite the same. Each store in the mall became a treasure hunt to find a relative, and the relatives got more complex. If they were even made out of the same material as my wristwatch, Jared called them “almost relatives.”

I was doing a verbal version of the New Skin activity. I am always struck by the strong attachment that students have to the physical objects that they build in the classroom, but I was surprised by how long Jared wanted to sustain this verbal game. Just before leaving him that night, he said, “So, if you're a wristwatch, when you die, we can just get a new battery and you'll be okay.”

His parents said that for the first time in days, Jared went to bed alone that night and slept straight through until morning. Now in his twenties, he still remembers everything about that day.