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Time Is Short: a meditation on teaching art
Perhaps it’s a vestige of the agricultural heritage here in the Grand Valley in western Colorado, but our school children are released for the summer in mid-May. Growing up in California, we went from Labor Day to Memorial Day, at least. Beginning of September to end of May, or early June. Here, it’s been tradition to let them out in May to help on the farms and ranches. Since January I’ve been squeezing in days that I can work with my fifth graders at one of the school district’s most rural elementary schools. Set literally between cow and horse pastures, our school is comprised of an interesting mix of ranch families, folks who bought cheap land and built a big house, and folks who pretty nearly live off the grid even though it’s not really their choice. Our little school (300 students more or less) hunkers down between a stretch of a highway that leads into the mountains and to the backcountry of Utah, and horse and cow pastures. When I drive to work, I get into my car in my neighborhood of mature trees and cozy cottage houses stretched between a major medical center complex and a university campus. I emerge 30 minutes later in the parking lot of the school, which seems like an extension of the surrounding fields. There is always a meadowlark that trills when I get out of the car. This transition always reminds me of who my kids are, and allows me to adjust my head before I walk in. Earlier this year while my students were working on the raw clay, rolling out slabs to work with, busy with the kinetic tasks of modeling and shaping images, they were talking. I don’t subscribe to silence while artists are at work. My rules are simple. Keep it clean and keep it nice. No dissing ANYONE, even yourself. That said, it is highly fascinating to listen to the conversations that occur when kids have their hands in wet clay, or are focused on painting glaze (which doesn’t behave like any kind of paint they’ve ever used, and thus gives them an opportunity for problem solving). So one young man says to another, “I can’t believe they won’t let us wear our work boots to school anymore. They said we’ll track feces all over” (said with an audible eye roll). Probably not a comment you’d hear in your average school setting. Tomorrow I will fire the last batch of clay tiles. Last week the students painted on the glazes they want, making decisions that will be permanent, but will not ever be “wrong.” One child decided to mix two colors of glaze to get a different brown than I had available. When glaze goes on, it is chalky and a completely different color than it will turn out when it’s been fired. The student asked me how much to use, and I told her I had no clue. Baffled looks. I’m the art teacher, right? But I don’t know how it will turn out. So many possibilities. So I told her to just do what seemed right, and we’d see how it looks. She said “It’s okay, it’ll work”. Bam. Yes. In the past few weeks I’ve been fitting work on the tiles between standardized testing and regular classwork these children need to be ready for middle school. They are tired, grumpy, stressed. Some of them are SOOOO ready to be in middle school, but some are really grieving for their loss. One girl just wants to stay with her “favorite teacher of all time.” Another is hoping her parents will agree to homeschool her so she doesn’t have to see “all those girls running around with tank tops on.” She goes back to painting glaze. “Can I use this line painter to make dots?” I ask her what she thinks. She tries it out, and gleefully paints dots on her ladybug. Another student uses this new tool to fill in the depressions where she has pressed letter stamps into the clay. They share it around, show each other how to hold it and squeeze the bottle just enough. Tactile. Small motor skills. Learning through teaching. Problem solving (with no set answer). Predicting results. Flexible thinking. Tolerance. Self-critique. Cooperation. Group work. I recently read an article about how visiting a museum can make young people measurably more tolerant and kinder. Plus, they actually remembered what they learned in discussion groups about the pieces they saw. Combine visual with kinetic with oral and the experience implants itself in a young brain. A pattern is set, an indentation on the smooth surface of their memories, which will receive information again and again over their lives, and it will fit into this indentation, and be familiar. Our new Education Secretary, John B. King, Jr., has expressed concern that the testing models now are taking up instructional time, and have squeezed out science, social studies, art and music in the race to improve English and math skills. He has proposed that perhaps different models could be used to measure students’ abilities, rather than “low-level bubble tests” such as essays and research projects, which would, one would hope, be assessed by the teachers. This is a big, fat “NO, REALLY?” for me. With the testing load teachers have now, especially in states where Common Core has been interpreted to mean that test scores determine teacher pay, the result is that teachers are not given the respect of their education and professionalism to determine how and when and how much to teach which subjects in order to best serve their students’ needs. Weren’t we there, with teachers assigning essays and projects to gauge student work, before we got so bogged down with tests? Please let this new acronym ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) be code for “give the respect of professionalism back to the teachers” and not “here are some more hoops to jump through”. Time and respect. A few
How to Jump Start a Young Writer Who’s Running Into a Wall
I remember as a young writer in grammar school having to come up with my own ideas and topics to write about. In the 1980’s, this may have been a typical scenario, but as a homeschool mom, I am learning with my children that the ways of old, in this case, were not wise. Benjamin Franklin utilized the technique of imitation as a way to train himself to write. His literary texts were articles that he used as models for writing his own work. Because he was dismissed early in his life as a writing failure, he sought the excellence of other work to master the art of writing. This sounds like a logical path to follow and I know that when I get my hands on a piece of literature—essay or short story, or long fiction—I keep them handy as a framework to use to build my own work. It is like a sewing pattern. We need them as guides to know where to cut, where to fold, and how much fabric to use. Likewise, for the young writer, it is most important to start them off this way. A blank sheet of paper with the instruction to write is already a failed attempt. We can have our young writers free-write to prime the pump, but to produce something excellent, we need to start them off by getting them close to another work of literature. This isn’t to suggest that our young writers become counterfeits of another, nor does it imply that this learning model will hinder their creative voices from flourishing. Since the blank page needs to be filled, the young writer needs a jump start. In the homeschool, my fifth grader will read a source text that engages him and has historical value. It could be around a theme of the past, or a theme of the present. It could be a “living book,” as Charlotte Mason (English educator of the 19th century) would put it. For instance, recently he’s read biographical material about Harriet Tubman, Johann Sebastian Bach, Levi Strauss, Dr Seuss, and Florence Nightingale, each with their own set of paragraphs telling the most amazing details of these people’s lives. Then, the young writer may use this source material to create a keyword outline, highlighting the most important details, finding two or three central topics (such as childhood, personality, etc.) that will bring it all together. What I typically do when the outline is completed is have my son do what I call a public speaking drill. He looks at his outline, and in front of his brother, sister, and myself, he reads off his outline– but, the caveat is that he is not just reading word for word, but rather looking at the keywords, then lifting his face up to speak in complete sentences what those keywords are about. It is a very helpful exercise because it not only teaches him to know the material he has read but to learn to speak it publicly. And isn’t that also another beneficial lesson? To be able to speak publicly without reading from a script while mutually having grasped what you have learned? Writing assignments don’t need to be broad. They only require the proper source material to help lead a writer to devise his own outline, to write a composition based from that outline, and to enjoy what he’s learned.
