Made all the worse by the one good photo! I had poise and it slipped away! I have never healed from the experience of worrying that the result will be horrible, and moments later, confirming that it was. In the others, my bangs are parted in the middle or I’m wearing an “authentic” shark tooth necklace or I’m slouching into an expression of pure pain and discomfort, which is still how I react to having my photo taken. Unfortunately, this is not the case with any of my other school photos. Why do these photos feel so strangely powerful, like they say something essential about how we think about ourselves for the rest of our lives?
But it’s also well-recounted and quite vivid, so Helen, it seems to me, knows that a good story is worth more than a good picture.
This is a horrifying memory, obviously: terrorism, mom yelling at you, too young to know what “Kittens!” might mean. My mom was PISSED, I remember her screaming that we didn’t have the money for pictures in the first place.” (Her hair doesn’t really look that bad if you ask me.) “There were a bunch of wallet-sized ones, which I scribbled all over with a Sharpie. “I believe I got it from Pac Sun and I thought ‘Kittens!’ had to be some kind of sexual reference but didn’t know what, but I wore it anyway to be ~edgy~ And the hair was my misguided attempt at wielding a flat iron,” she says. She is wearing a purple shirt that says “Kittens!” “I was so embarrassed that I made myself sick so I could go home after it was taken lol.” Helen is 12 in the photo and it was taken the day before 9/11. “I have one that was so bad I showed it to my therapist last week,” a New York woman named Helen messaged me. “There were a bunch of wallet-sized ones, which I scribbled all over with a Sharpie. “My permanently captured youth and beauty haunts me.” Carmen was having what she calls “beginner’s luck” with hair products, pouting, and wearing a purple American Apparel hoodie - “you know the one,” she says, and I do. “I’m 25 and to this day I’ll never feel as photogenic as I did for my tenth grade student ID,” a Boston woman named Carmen messaged me. The stories were as fresh and crisp as a stack of wallet-sized portraits someone paid $30 for and kept in the plastic wrap for 20 years. Marcos is not the only person for whom a school photo has held significance long into adulthood, and I know this because I put out one measly tweet asking for grown-ups with stories of memorable K-12 portraiture and received a dozen responses basically immediately. “It’s exactly who I was and how I wanted to portray myself at the time.” He now wears bow ties and is known around the office as a clean-cut “crazy socks guy.” But the old photo is nice. But my parents still loved me and wanted to have photos of everything.” But his junior year school photo features all of them - smuggled to school in his backpack - and his parents bought copies of it anyway: “It may not have been sent out in the Christmas card. His parents were Catholic and did not approve of his long hair or spiked bracelets or Slipknot t-shirts or combat boots or trips to Hot Topic, and his dad often stole his black nail polish. Below is first the staff information video, and then the video for pupils – as always, if you choose to use this activity in the classroom, we would love to hear from you.“My school photos rarely see the light of day,” Marcos, a man from Colorado who used to be very goth, tells me in a Twitter message.
Just like with the Rivers of Reading, reasons behind choices are important, and so an opportunity to write or talk about the language portrait is important, too. The premise is simple – you choose one colour for each language you consider part of your identity, and colour in the outline of a person, in any way you want. An instructions sheet is also included in the downloads section.Įssentially, a language portrait is a tried and tested way to encourage children to talk about their different languages, and how they form a part of their identity. Just like the Rivers of Reading activity, we have not created a traditional lesson plan, but instead, a short staff information video, and a short video for pupils, which can be used to explain the activity to them.
While a language portrait is not inherently linked to nature, like the Rivers of Reading activity, it forms part of creating an inclusive learning environment, and gives teachers an opportunity to learn from pupils about how their different languages are part of their identity.
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