Generally, when you walk into a class at 8:15 in the morning, most of the students are still half-asleep. But that isn’t what happened today when photographer Joel Silverstein, Florence Allegrini and I visited Kristen O’Sullivan’s Grade Eight English class at FACE here in Montreal.

Kristen’s students were wide awake, not to mention full of great ideas. It didn’t take us long to settle on a general theme for the class’s chapter in the 2012 edition of Quebec Roots: The Place Where I Live. Because every student at FACE takes music, they want to focus on music and the role it plays in their lives and their community.

I shouldn’t be giving too much away in this blog entry, but I have to tell you a bit more about their idea — mainly because I’m so excited about it. They want to use musical terms such as “Dissonance” (which means conflict) and “Allegro” (which means quick) as titles for their pieces of writing, and perhaps also to inspire their photographs. Very cool, don’t you think?!

I tried to be as honest as possible with the students. I told them how for me, writing isn’t easy and how I often feel dissatisfied with my work (especially my first drafts!!). For me, writing well is often a question of perseverance, re-working and re-working again, until I get close to the effect I am after. As musicians, I felt the students really understood my point. After all, they have to practice a lot in order to make a performance seem effortless.

When it was Joel’s turn to work with the class, he asked them an interesting question, “Why take photographs?” Their answers were even more interesting! Eman (cool name, right?) answered, “For fun!” (I loved that answer since I’m a great fan of fun, and I think that if a writer or a photographer or a musician gets to have fun, we can feel it in the work). Jasper had another answer: “To change the way people see.” (I loved that too because it suggests the power of photographs — and writing and music.) There were many more good answers. Mary said, “to convey emotion”; Chloe said, “to enable us to relive a moment,” and Aisha said, “to tell a story.” All those answers remind me of what we all try to do when we attempt to create something meaningful through words, images and sound…

As you can tell, I’m really looking forward to reading the students’ work and to seeing their photos. Something tells me we’re going to learn a lot from this gang. I don’t usually get attached so quickly to a class, but you guys, well you worked some kind of magic on me today!