Connect-the-dots

Whenever we went on car trips, my mother gave each of the children in my family a little book full of picture games. I always did the crossword puzzles and word searches first. The only "art" in the book that ever captured my attention were the pages that told me to connect-the-dots. The first time I came across one of these activities, I looked dubiously at the page. My five-year-old brain could not make a picture out of those dots when I stared at them. Taken at face value, the dots made absolutely no sense. Then I put my pencil to paper and -- what magic! -- if I continuously followed the sequence of numbers, a picture emerged.

Most of the papers I read have dots scattered throughout in what often seems like an illogical pattern to me. The literal part of my brain -- the part that wants to take everything at face value -- thinks, "All I can see is a bunch of dots." The more artistic, less prosaic part of my brain -- the part the connect-the-dot activities appealed to all of those years ago -- surveys the dots and thinks, "If I put my pencil down on the paper and continuously draw lines from point A to point B to point C, will I see begin to the picture of a light bulb they have outlined?"

I know there are problems with order when, try as I might, I cannot connect the dots to find the larger picture.

It's not that I have an inability to stretch my thinking. If you read some of the early essays I wrote, you would know I can stretch with the best. And it's not that the dots aren't there. I can clearly see the individual dots, which makes my inability to see the larger picture that much more frustrating. And it's not that the student is stupid, either. Most of the students know what they are saying.

When I struggle with a paper that is disordered, I ask the student to verbally connect the dots for me. I ask the student to set aside the paper and then request the same thing of them that the King of Hearts requested of the White Rabbit: "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop." The beginning may not always be where their paper began and the end is rarely where they ended. But I find if a student can narrate the ideas behind a paper, together we can shift emphasis and the two of us can begin to figure out how to logically number the dots. Before long, a bigger picture gradually emerges and the paper flows because readers can continuously read from point A to point B to point C without feeling as though they encountered a train wreck and several multi-car accidents on the way.