My grade 8 students at FACE high school in Montreal are exceptional people with wild imaginations and an intense hunger for creative writing. We started off the year working on descriptive writing. I gave the students your standard, "tell me what you did this summer", but asked them to zero in on one incredible moment where time seemed to stand still. From there, they've completed three moment assignments where they've had to hash out a "timeless" point in their lives.
For their final moment assignment, I threw them a curve ball. I introduced seven images to the class that I'd taken at some point over the past couple of years. Using one picture, the students had to create a fictional moment from the individual perspective of a character they conceived in their minds.
There is no doubt in my mind this is a challenging writing assignment.
However there's a treat at the end of the moment project. Each image is attached to a moment that I've had, or an important moment of a friend or family member. I'll be sharing these moments with the class and they'll share their fictional ones. Moments, after all, are creations of our own memory and are just as malleable as memory itself.
"We do not remember days. We remember moments" (Cesare Pavese)
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