Call for Postcards

Our school year is coming to a close and I'm filing away all of those miscellaneous bits of paper, lesson notes, attendance rosters and other detritus that collects on a teacher's desk throughout the year. During the filing process I've developed the habit of putting sticky notes on things that I want to change for the next academic year. Perhaps I'll get to this stuff at the end of this year or maybe it will turn into a project this summer when I'm not so busy. I'm also making plans in case I get my biggest wish for next year: a classroom of my own. This isn't some existential Virginia Woolfe-ian comment on that which I need to create art. A room is an actual, physical want of mine. At the moment I wander around campus teaching my four classes in seven different rooms spread across four different buildings. As you might have guessed, I'm sick of having to cart texts and supplies all over the school.

The biggest problem this mobility created was that my students didn't have a space that felt like it was "theirs." This year we were always using "someone else's" classroom; the walls in our rooms came pre-covered with posters and other students' work by the time we settled into a rooming schedule. We worked around this issue and eventually ended up settling into routines but things never really finished up in a satisfying manner. I didn't get to take student work off the walls and return it to them with a "thanks for letting us use your work this year."

One of the things I'd like to set up in my classroom next year (if I get one) is a display that represents the diversity of students and teachers we have at our school. This year alone I've worked with people from the UK, Canada, New Zealand (both pakeha and Maori), Samoa, Australia, Iraq, Cambodia, Korea, China, Thailand, Croatia, Russia, Scotland, Ireland, India, Germany and other countries that slip my mind at the moment. I made it a habit to know where each of my students came from and they made sure to grill me about America and Montana throughout the year. I learned quite a bit about the rest of the world, as you might have guessed, and this is one of my favourite aspects of my job. One thing that diversity creates is a sense of placelessness. So many of my students, and myself to a certain extent as well, struggle to make sense of what it means to have a history grounded in one culture while both of your feet are ankle-deep in another. All of us needed a way to create a place that truly was ours, even if for one school year.

One way to create this sense of identity and place is with a unique class display: maps covered with tacks to represent points of origin, flags and other such regalia that traditionally represent individual cultures, and pictures of landmarks and cultural events. This is a tired idea, though, and one that's been around the block one too many times.

I'd like to build something slowly over the course of the first term with my classes next year, as a group. We most certainly use and need a map along with the other stuff as a starting point, but I want to see my students putting their heritage out there for others to see. I want my students to share what it is that makes each one of them unique, and to do so in ways that are equally as unique.

To get this ball rolling I'm asking for your help. I'll need to model this project for my students and so will need the thing that best epitomise the diversity of America and her spirit of adventure: postcards! I plan to put up a map of the US and pictures from Montana so the boys can see where I come from. If anyone happens to be travelling through an airport or gas station this holiday season and spots a cool/unique/cheesy postcard, send it along. There will be no need to write anything personal on it because it'll be laminated and put up on the wall of a boys school. Just pop it in the mail, particularly if you are one of my wonderful family members or friends in Montana, California, Minnesota, Illinoise, Washington state, Nevada, Canada or points inbetween.

Hopefully, with your help, I can put together a groovy picture of America for my students next year.