drawing in class

I think I'd better put these drawings in context: this summer's class, on "Reading Teaching Enjoying (British) Poetry" is aimed at (largely) high school teachers, and focuses on pedagogy, and the kind of tactics and techniques that one might use in the classroom.  So different pairs/trios of students take turns in leading the class - and then hand over to me at some later point - and we all, together, take part in various exercises, trying out what their own students might be asked to do.  Yesterday, as I said, we were all asked to draw a "literacy map," with no guidance (deliberately) as to what this might be.  Mine was more graphic than most - many used words and arrows alone - but what also strikes me about mine (and yes, if you really want to, you can see it by blowing up the picture) is that it's focused on when I was around 2-3, when I started to read - with a flash forward to when we lived in Cumberland (from 3+ onwards for a few years) and my main source of books was Carlisle library, often via the library van.  Right at the center is Top Flat, 3 Copse Hill - and a bubble shows my mother reading to me, running her finger underneath the words as she went - and apparently I just picked it up, and one day was to be discovered reading The Times - probably not extensively reading The Times, but still ... And then there's a long and winding road down to Wimbledon Public Library, where I borrowed my first books (starting with The Cow Who Fell in the Canal, and I can remember exactly where that was on the shelf).  And I think that's about right, when it came to literacy: if I could read Winnie the Pooh on my own by the time I was three and a half, I guess I was literate?  I can't remember learning to write, but there again, I can't remember not being able to write ...

And the drawing on the left?  That's from an earlier class, where we were all asked to draw what we saw in a poem - a brief poem - so that's Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" - and quite curiously, drawing it, I felt inside the poem like never before ...