Introducing Oneself through Symbols

Like many other school teachers across the country, I begin the school year with an activity that introduces students to me and to their classmates. My choice is a writing activity that involves symbols and associations. By the end of the class period, students know each other better, I have an interesting and sometimes unusual mental image to help me remember each student's name, and I have learned something about my students' level of abstract thinking.

I use metal markers from an old Monopoly game for symbols, but other sets of small, diverse items could be just as effective. (Some possibilities might include chess pieces; figure cards from a Tarot deck; a dumptruck, a hot rod, a Rolls Royce, a Chevy, a firetruck, and a wrecker from a Matchbox car collection, or even an assortment of small desk items such as a paper clip, a stapler, a pad of paper, a rubber band, a pencil sharpener, and a pocket calculator.)

As I display the symbols, I tell students that we are all symbol makers; we all have associations with simple objects - a flag, a ring, a baseball - that go beyond the superficial significance of these objects. Then I explain that students will be asked to choose the Monopoly marker that they would associate with themselves and to explain their choice in writing.

To demonstrate, I first list on the chalkboard the symbols we are using: the top hat, the flat iron, the shoe, the wheelbarrow, the Scotch terrier, the horse and rider, the thimble, and the racing car. I tell students that I would select the shoe marker, and I write my reasons as a series of numbered statements on the overhead projector.

1. I am a busy person and am on my feet a lot.

2. I like to walk for exercise, since it requires little equipment (the clothes on your back, plus shoes!) and refreshes the mind and body.

3. Many artists, Vincent Van Gogh for one, have painted portraits of their shoes in ways that are memorable, revealing, and poignant. I believe that people's shoes make statements about the wearers.

4. The junior high art teacher has a collection of old shoes in a huge box in her room. Each year, students are asked to draw these shoes as an exercise in realism. I have special memories of some of my students and their shoe drawings.

Next, students write about their own associations with the symbols they chose, and volunteers read their writings aloud.

I have used this activity several times with advanced seventh-grade students and have been pleased and impressed with the results. And once I become better acquainted with my boy and girl thimbles, racing cars, and top hats, I often find that their early symbolic analyses of their own characters prove remarkably perceptive.

Mary Ann Rygiel
Auburn High School, Auburn, Alabama

This article originally appeared in the September 1988 issue of Notes Plus.