It May Be The Only Time Of Day

I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience during CI:
You build an image with the kids, for whatever reason (story, PQA. or just to build a little one word image for fun), and pretty soon this kind of weird ownership or the image emerges from the kids.
Like, you can’t change any details without their permission. You’ve established that the miniature girl has red hair, and if you slip on repeating a details (often on purpose) and casually say that her hair is blue, there is a rebellion. They won’t let you change it. The mini girl there has become THEIR girl, and you can’t change it.
This kind of ownership requires your total respect. I very often honestly don’t care about such details – I do this kind of CI five times a day, so the images that occur throughout the day don’t really resonate with me on a personal ownership level. But with them they really do.
And this phenomenon is often true with most of them, really – it’s weird how many of them will fight for and relate to the image, like a kind of group think thing, where they don’t want you to mess with their movie.
I think it would be really good if we could somehow really appreciate how important the image that those kids create is to them. Maybe if we could get to a deeper level of our own appreciation for the image, we could then get more into the reality of what they are experiencing, and therefore get a deeper kind of CI taught, because of the authenticity of what we would all then be experiencing together.
This goes back to what Susan Gross has always stressed about the process of the creation of CI – we need to BELIEVE what we are creating with them. It is very important to them and we need to honor that. Then, when we bring the image of the very very small girl with the very big ears and the yellow glasses and her funny little dog who looks likes her, but not completely, back for another bow or cameo in a new setting later on, it brings more buy in, more interest, more group power and focus, and – dare I say this word in this new era of testing their little butts off – fun?
I guess I can understand it. Here we are, asking them – during the course of their school day – to create something in the mighty realm of their imaginations, precisely at a time when, over the past four to six years in their young lives, that faculty in them, that part of their lives, has been largely ripped away and chewed on by people who think that what is best for them at that time of their lives (10 to 15 years of age) is to take a test on something, to prove that they know some item or other, to get ready for the big test at the end of the year, so that we can catch up with the Japanese or whoever it is that we are behind that year.
It’s all about control. Let’s give them as much as we can in our classes! God bless them, for growing up bravely in a world of testing that’s getting worse. We can forgive them for getting a little obsessive about all those bizarre details of some of the things that come up in our classes. It may be the only time of day when someone asks them to imagine something.