Innovative+ELT+Technique+'wreck+this+Journal'+by+HÜLYA+ERGÜN

**WRECK THIS JOURNAL**
====Teacher can come across with a lot of students with a fear of failure, a dysfunctional attraction to perfection and characteristics of obsessive compulsive disorder. Espacially if you are working with high school students, you can naturally have girls with depression, very low self-worth and an eating disorder, and also boys with heightened anger and asperger/autistic characteristics. And some are any combination. The aim of this activity is to overcome students who are paralyzed by their pursuit of perfection. ====

** The process is as the following; **
==== Teacher purchases **__ [|Keri Smith's Wreck this Journal] __** for his students and encourages them to destroy it. (While you might think all children would love to be given permission to destroy a book, you would be surprised how many children find this task to be at best tedious and at worst torture.) ====

Then the class and the teacher talk about the activity and the things beyond the activity:

 * ====Perfection is not motivating. Perfection is paralyzing.====
 * ====Some of the best things in life can't be planned. In fact, sometimes the best things in life are mistakes that we make the most of.====
 * ====Mistakes are our friends.====
 * ====If you're not making mistakes, you're not living.====
 * ====Mistakes are not only ok, they are necessary if learning and success is to take place.====
 * ====Society hides our mistakes and failures but flaunts successes. This can be deceiving.====
 * ====The only way to make your journal unique is to wreck it.====

Here is what one of his students said about her experience with this project:
> ===='I found the "Wreck This Journal" project incredibly challenging and difficult. To push myself to deface any sort of material (let alone a book) felt like a death wish. It was a tedious task at first; being told to tear out a page or doodle on the front cover.. but as the project moved forward I was able to let go and embrace the experience... I think spending time on this project has given me a new outlook on life, and made me realize that striving for perfection is an unrealistic and costly goal.'==== > > ====I realy find this idea useful and applicable because especially if you are working at high school, you will have alot of students who has problems because of adolescence or other issues. You will help those students by talking to some extend. You should also give them a real example to support you discussion about their problem. This example above is a useful activity to make your discussions more concrete.==== > ====We can easily adapt this into our clasroom context. We don't have to find the book mentioned above. We can use any book and ask our students to wreck it.After that we can discuss with them about the points that are stated above. Then we can create a template on the board from what students say about the points that have been discussed. Or you can note students comments on your own personal agenda.==== > > ====Retrieved from: []====

__**Comments:**__

EMRULLAH YASİN ÇİFTÇİ

"Wreck this Journal" activity is one of the most interesting motivating activity I have ever seen. Firstly, thank you for introducing that activity to us. I totally agree with you that the activity can be best applied to teenagers namely high school students. Because of their developmental stage, they feel they would die if they made mistakes and the most corrupting part is that their fault would be seen by their friends and they would make fun of them. While I was reading the sentences above such as "if you're not making mistakes, you're not living." , I even felt motivated towards making mistakes :) Thus, this will definitely work with teenagers and they would be more aware of living in an imperfect world. If we think the stages of learning a second language, we will see mistakes are unavoidable and this activity would make them aware of mistakes in language learning. Thank you very much for introducing us such a great tecnique! ,