First Paint

I always feel a hint of sadness coming over me when the leaves begin their annual change of colour from green to a hue of orange, yellow and brown. But, at the same time, it signals the passage of the summer and the approach of the coming winter and indeed, it tells us all that we are just a bit older to notice the change.

I did not set out in an assignment to capture some fall colours, but rather, these images are leftovers. I wanted an image yesterday for the bottom of the page with some leaf colour changes and these were the ones I did not select.

A lot of what we try to do in life is like that, we set forth to conquer a problem and whilst moving through it, accrue a sort of vortex of fragments of the project at hand. I think there are times when we need to stop and look at the confusion and see if there are things of value that were not part of the goal intended.

In education we called that "incidental learning" I particularly believed in it and often thought that the stated goals were not as important as the process by which we headed along, to obtain those goals. Indeed, talking to students and listening to what

they remember most about a lesson, is a shocking thing for a teacher, as they discover that the unintended, the accidents that had occurred during the lesson, were often more important to the learner than the object of the lesson. When I realised that, I began to include in all my history lessons, all sorts of what seemed like trivial stuff, but for the student, it was that trivial stuff that helped them remember the content and perhaps that's true of these pages.

The intent may be one thing, but what the viewer, or reader gets, may be something entirely from within themselves.