Driving me Cuckoo

So the last two days of term managed to glean a surprising amount of moments that made me happy that I do the job I do.

First of all I had a year nine class who are normally; "challenging", "lively" or "a royal pain in the arse", behaving like decent young adults engaged in creative design and make tasks. Wonders will never cease. The buzz of seeing them all working away independently and enjoying their work makes all the shit times seem worth it.

My classes then appeared to be consistently amusing from Thursday afternoon onwards. First I had a lad called Abdi who came up to me and told me that he had sanded his Flexible Fish project down too far on the band facer and now it looked like a poo.

"Can I colour it in brown sir it looks like a poo?"

"Yes Abdi of course. Adapt and overcome. I love your initiative. You will go far."

Abdi coloured it then showed his eye for fashion style by making a little red conical party hat to put on top of his poo. Lovely.

I took a picture of it on my phone but I am reluctant to post it. I change all the names of the kids on here too. Just in case it comes back to bite me on the arse someday. If you really want to see it then I might just say to hell with it and throw caution to the wind. Live a little. Post that poo.

Anyway a year 10 Product Design class that I was covering gave me the highlight of the week. I was trying to get them to think creatively to design a product by giving them the item to be designed (in this case a clock). Then coming up with two random objects unrelated to the clock. These objects are then used to spark ideas to design the clock. For example: design a new Mobile Phone using an orange and a chair as inspiration. The student would then analyse an orange: the texture of its skin, segments, colours, tastes, smells etc etc do the same with the chair and then combine elements of each to design the phone. This sometimes produces brilliant results. Sometimes not so good but it's quite a nice exercise.

So one pupil today had to design his clock using the random words: "fire" and "building".

I came round to look at his work at the end and he had drawn a skyscraper that was on fire (with a clock face on it). The skyscraper had two men on the top of the building and the design of the clock meant that these men jumped off, committing suicide, on the hour every hour.

Truly a Cuckoo clock for the 9/11 generation.