Commentary

A note on cutting zig-zags

April 9, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Anthony Carnovale

For the past month, my Grade 12 Literacy Class has been working on creating their own vision boards. Their vision boards are made up from a collage of images, words, and affirmations that represent their goals and aspirations. I like the idea of vision boards because they can help a kid focus on what they want to achieve in life. It’s an important time for this group to be doing that — they’re a few months away from graduating, and some have zero idea as to what to do with the rest of their lives. 

This is particularly concerning for this group of kids. You see, these are the kids who failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. If you don’t pass the test, you don’t graduate. Instead of writing the test a second time, they can take this class. If they don’t pass, they don’t graduate. Their literacy skills are weak, and many struggle with some of the more basic expectations of the curriculum. 

I love working with them. What they may lack academically, they make up for with personality, authenticity, and creativity. No standardized test can measure that. They like learning, but most don’t like school. They like being in my class (because they’re in my class). When I read their work (grammatical errors and all), I’m always reminded of what a privilege it is to teach them. 

That being said, I’m worried about them. I’m worried for so many of our young people (my own children, as well). I feel like we (adults) are handing them a world that’s been forced through a wood chipper, and we’re asking them to build a rocket ship. They’re a few months shy of graduating into a world that doesn’t look anything like the world many of us graduated into — a world where Amazon recently cut 15,000 jobs for what it calls ‘AI efficiencies’ (Facebook has announced a cut of upwards of 25,000 people for the same reasons). These kids don’t even show up to class with a pen and paper. How are they going to compete in an economy transformed by AI?  And here I am having them cut words and images from magazines and newspapers? 

While creating the assignment, I stumbled across this quote from the Bible: “And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” If you can write it, you can run to it. If you can see it, you can be it. The idea of a vision board is that you hang it somewhere so that it’s the first thing that you see when you wake up each morning. It gives you something to work for, to run towards. This is the goal of the unit.

There’s a scene in The Godfather that rips apart me ol’ heart every time I see it. It happens early in the film, when Michael is visiting his father, Don Corleone, who is recovering from a botched assassination attempt. When Michael arrives at the hospital, he’s dismayed – there are no nurses or police officers keeping watch. When a nurse finally shows up, she tells Michael that the police ordered everyone to leave. Sensing another attempt on his father’s life, Michael and the nurse move him into another room. With his father safe, Michael hears footsteps approaching. It’s Enzo, the baker, wanting to pay his respects. Michael tells Enzo to wait outside. When Michael joins him, he grabs the flowers from Enzo and tosses them away. 

“Put your hand in your pocket like you have a gun!” 

A car with four men pulls up, faces hidden beneath their fedoras. One of the men is brandishing a gun. Michael tries to reach for his own gun, but the car drives away. Michael tells Enzo that he did a good job. 

The baker’s nerves are rattled, his hands are shaking so hard that he can’t light his cigarette — Michael has to do it for him. 

I feel for Enzo. He was pushed onto the frontlines of a war not of his own making. It’s the ‘gangster ethos’- do anything to protect your own, even if it puts innocent people in harm’s way. This is the story of our time.  

I’m not sure how to describe this world to my students. I can’t tell them what to see; I just need them to ‘see’ (like they don’t already). I mean, how do I prepare them for these uncertainties and obstacles, and still provide space for their dreams? Can they look to our leaders? These leaders who take up so much of our spaces and places? Doug, Donald, and Carney? It’s like an episode of Looney Tunes, and we’ve lost the remote to change the channel. This, in a world marked, and marred, by the six degrees of separation from Jeffrey Epstein? 

How is it possible to be hopeful? 

Scissors and glue? Really? 

Here’s another way:

Robert Desnos was a Surrealist writer, famous for his evocative imagination. Desnos and a group of fellow prisoners were being taken away from the concentration camp where they were being held. Everybody was aware that they were headed to the gas chambers. Once they got off the truck, no one could speak —even the guards. Eventually, the silence is interrupted by a sprightly man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the prisoners. Desnos reaches for the man’s hand, and on a whim, reads the man’s palm. He tells the man that he has a very long lifeline and that he’s going to have three children. The man is jubilant; his excitement is infectious. Desnos eventually reads everybody’s palm. The mood has changed. The guards are so disoriented by the sudden change that they’re unable to go through with the executions. All the prisoners are put back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. A stay of execution? Perhaps, a story of elocution? 

What if we could reframe the collective dread that so many are feeling as ‘a collective failure of imagination’? If we saw it this way, perhaps, we could imagine a new story, a new future. Cut up the script that is being forced upon us, and create something new, something we all could look forward to waking up to each and every day?

Do you have your scissors handy? 

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