One of the artistic driving forces of the new Invisibles/emergent targets concept was a 6th grader from England – Jack – who last year at the American Embassy School in New Delhi created some memorable images, mainly the famous Vampspooder the Spider.
At that time, we weren’t using One Word Images (Kathrin Shechtman’s breakthrough idea in Agen this summer) to create the images. Rather, without OWI to create the Invisible characters having been invented at that point, the kids would simple lock on to each other’s throats in aggressive artistic combat trying to outdo each other in quality of their artwork to come up with characters (not words, which don’t stick in memory like images*). Their drawings would then be presented at the start of class for the big honor of having their character be the subject of the emergent targets story that day.
*(Why images and not words to drive a story? It is what Earl Stevick, one of Krashen’s early mentors, said about imagination driving memory which in turn drives acquisition, which is a very powerful thing to say if you stop and think about it.)
Anyway, this 6th grader will never know it, because I have lost contact with him as he is back in England with his diplomat family this year, but just by chance one of Tina Hargaden’s Spanish classes in Portland, OR has created a clone of one of Jack’s best characters, Howard the Half Eaten Corndog, without knowing it.
Of course, the class in Portland wants to know what Howard looks like, since they think they had the inside scoop on coming up with corn dogs in Invisibles stories. I just thought the whole thing so odd that two classes in different years across the planet would come up with basically the same Invisibles creature.
Here is the original first Howard:
Here is the imposter corn dog from Oregon:
