One of my favorite school assignments as a kid was one where I had to make up a new country. I spent hours relishing every arcane detail; in my polar regions, none of the city names had vowels, because I figured people in Arctic climes wouldn’t want to open their mouths in the cold. I liked drawing that country so much I kept making fake maps well into my adult life.
As Western Civilization so rarely abets free-range cartography as a creative outlet, when Bob Jury first proposed this workshop, it seemed to me like a public service. How many times in your life does someone without ulterior motives ask you to create and describe the world you’d most want to live in? When I heard of the opportunity to assist Bob, I didn’t hesitate. I hoped the students would be as enthusiastic about it as I was.
Given the scope of the project (the students were asked not only to make a map, but laws, a flag, and a World Almanac-style one sheet of relevant data) the two hours disappeared in a blur of crayons and ink. I spent the whole time on my feet, forgetting to eat or drink anything, dashing around to the various students as questions or revelations would arise. Was five trillion too small a population for Emily’s country? (Yes, as it turned out.) If Matthew’s map has a black hole, can Jake’s have a white hole? (Sure.) That turns everything it touches into toilet paper? (Why wouldn’t it?)
Most of the time, the students just wanted to share the results of their creativity, all of which were completely charming and often insightful into the child’s worldview. A few expressed social consciences in the form of a homeless shelter or boarding house, many delineated harsh tax codes (e.g., a tax on breathing, at $1,250 per, or a tax on each step you take, at a comparatively kind $50) and I believe almost every country had at least one city populated exclusively by an animal of choice.
Steve Butts, who teaches some of workshop’s students at a nearby school, was also present, helping the kids and offering constructive feedback. Afterwards, he told me of an assignment he enjoys doing in his own class called “pourquoi,” where the students have to hypothesize their own “why” behind some phenomena of their choice. As a student, I would have loved to receive such an assignment; not only could you never be wrong, but a correct answer of sorts, and perhaps an arresting story, is there for the making.
Looking back on my own school years, I don’t remember the multiple choice quizzes or the spelling drills; I remember the assignments that rewarded conjecture and abetted creativity, like the map. “Reality has not the slightest obligation to be interesting,” Borges wrote. “Reality may get along without that obligation, but hypotheses may not.”
If the lives of today’s workshop students continue to flourish with such compelling hypotheses and creations as I witnessed today, I have to say I’m eager to live in the world they grow to create. I’m going to have to vote against the tax on breathing, but the “white hole” sounds pretty useful.
