Portrait of the Artist as an
Old Man
Rama Hughes
In honor of our hundredth day of school, a second-grade teacher asked if we could collaborate on an art project and a creative writing
assignment for our students. It only
took a few minutes to weave our objec-
tives together. In their homeroom, our
second graders would describe what
their lives might be like in one hun-
dred years. In my class, they would
use simple shapes and photo refer-
ences to imagine what they might
look like when they are that old.
Getting Started
To prepare for the project, I took a
head-and-shoulders photograph of
each student. “What will you look
like when you are one hundred?” I
asked as they posed. Their expressions
ran the gamut from get-off-my-lawn to
hard-of-hearing to so-very-very-sad.
