Sound Doodles: an English Student’s Summer Adjustment
This past May, after 16 years of education, I decided to try something new; I went to summer school. Like most school children, I was never enthusiastic about that sibilant pair of words. Summer school sounded like a slithering snake trying to stalk my synapses. I much preferred smooth sunshine, sweet smells, and free time. In many ways I still do, but I felt that taking an extra class was the right decision, so I got cozy in the classroom with William Shakespeare and a curriculum far more condensed than I was used to.
At first I thought I wouldn’t face many challenges. I love literature, I’ve done well in my English classes, and I work at the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival, so I figured doing well in the class would come naturally. What I didn’t expect was the difficulty I had adapting to the summer schedule. I’m a bit of a nighthawk, so I generally don’t register for early morning classes. However, there was only one Shakespeare class to register for, and it was at 8:30 in the morning, lasting until 10:50. Now, I could handle the long class because I had taken night classes before, but I wasn’t used to taking the same two and a half hour class every day. Every morning I met with Shakespeare’s slippery syntax and elaborate density. Even with a prof who was interested, smart, and kind, I was having trouble engaging with the material.
At first, it was an issue of sleep deprivation. My internal clock disagreed with the early hour, and without a coffee at break, I would periodically nod off. The plays were interesting and the language was rich, but my eyelids were heavy and my attention short. I needed a way to focus myself and do the work I knew I was capable of.
My initial inclination was to work harder to take good notes. That’s what all good students do, right? Well, after the second class, I had one double sided sheet of notes. By the end of the seven-week course, I’d added just one more side of notes to my collection. Clearly that strategy didn’t work for me. After trying my best to write diligently for one class, I didn’t see much improvement in my focus, and my notes felt like fragmented snapshots of ideas that were more complete in my head. Something else was needed.
So what finally worked? Something that some people might consider a classroom sin: doodling. I knew that I learned better through listening to lectures than rushing to write them down, but at first I thought writing would help the depleted attention that I was trying to listen with. When I gave up on note taking, I started to doodle. At first, I thought it might be a sign that I was giving up, accepting that I couldn’t adjust to the unfamiliar schedule. Yet, the more I doodled, the more attentive I became. As I drew abstract shapes and cartoony animals, I began to get a deeper sense of how fascinating Hamlet’s conflicted masculinity is or how tragically King Richard the Third is portrayed in comparison to the noble characterization of King Henry the Fifth, how the real substance of King Lear is so ironically nihilistic. An activity that is supposed to be a distraction was helping me focus.
I’m not a visual artist, and I’m generally not a visual learner. I love the sound of language and learn best by listening. Yet, through doodling I was able to generate creative energy that helped me to interpret and retain what I heard in lectures while forming new ideas. The success that I had expected and desired to achieve began to come around.
Knowing that I had been listening closely, I decided to put all my faith in that attention. My three sides of notes were hardly apt for study material when it came time to write the final, so I needed to trust that my reading, listening, and interpretation skills would carry me. Leading up to the final, I was quite ill. I’m typically a person that tries to be extra health-conscious near exams, but on the morning that I wrote that final, I was nauseous even though I wasn’t nervous. Still, the focus I had stumbled upon throughout the course got me through the exam comfortably. In fact, I enjoyed writing essays that I had previously thought about while adding new ideas that hadn’t struck me until I actually started writing.
I did well in the class, but more importantly I felt fluent in the material. Shakespeare became much less of an enigma, and I could express ideas about his work without having to recall those ideas from a particular source of study material.
I know that not everybody can learn this way, and not everybody should. We all learn uniquely, and we need to work to understand how our learning styles are unique in order to make them effective. However, that understanding is ongoing, and it can only expand when we try new things. If I hadn’t tried taking a summer class, I may never have discovered how doodling can be a useful practice for me. If I hadn’t tried doodling, I may not have made as strong of a connection to the material in my summer class. Even when we struggle, we always benefit from new experiences and creative problem solving. When that creativity softens our struggles, we begin to see new potentials, and our anxiety digresses.
-Isaac Bond