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
Teaching Art
Hands Deep in Art
I never want to know ahead of time which kids are “those” kids. When I walk into a classroom, ready to teach a unit on art, I don’t want to know which kid is the one who falls off his chair to entertain his neighbors, which kid is a super-talented artist, or which kid is the mouse. It’s not that I want to walk blindly into a classroom, or that I have some airy-headed view that all kids are artists, and have equal “gifts.” I just know that it doesn’t matter how “talented” they are, it’s what is in their head and hands when they make art that is important. After teaching art as an itinerant “Artist in Residence” (which makes it sound like I lived at the school, but in fact simply means I am a working artist and am not required by the State to have teaching credentials) in a K-5 public school for several years, I noticed something interesting. I would walk into a classroom of 30 kids, not knowing them AT ALL . In the process of teaching a project I would see a student focus really hard, and come up with amazing and brilliant ideas, or use color in a way I would never have thought about. Later, the classroom teacher would come to me and say “You know, I really didn’t expect that kind of thing from that child.” And I would think, “I am so glad I didn’t know that before.” Oh don’t get me wrong, sometimes I walk into a classroom and instantly know which kid just cannot sit in their chair for more than three seconds, or which one is the super-motivated, future class president. And often that bright, motivated kid is very, very successful at working with the medium I am teaching. And sometimes the kid who is falling off the chair every time I look at them is a huge challenge to teach. But I seriously don’t want to hear from the teacher ahead of time which kids are “those” kids. Even if they normally display a prodigious talent for drawing horses or kittens or trains. Especially that. I could do a whole blog on the kids who have been told their whole life that they are terribly gifted at drawing, and how, by about third grade, they are so clenched about how they draw that they HAVE to draw the same thing over and over again, EXACTLY the same way. Not that I’m dissing natural talent, or a child who loves to draw. It’s just that every kid has a challenge of some kind. For some, it’s holding scissors correctly. For some, it’s learning that there is MUCH more to the world of art than drawing dogs realistically. So to the kid who says “I can’t draw” I say “Hallelujah! Neither can I. So let me show you how do do art.” Which brings me to my fifth grade tile project. Personally, I love my rock-star status as Art Teacher. I would not be a classroom teacher for all the money you could throw at me. The kids who come to me to work with clay do not have to be motivated. They come fully loaded and ready to go. We start by talking about the project. We go over what they need to know about the theme of the tiles, how to design in a four-inch square, and the basics of the clay process. I ask for a show of hands—who has worked with ceramic clay? A hand or two goes up. They’ve painted bisqueware at a local business. Not the same thing. How many love to get their hands into mud puddles? They look at me as if I’m daft. These are mostly farm kids. They know mud puddles. They don’t put their hands in them. “Imagine if you were drawing your design in the mud with a stick,” I tell them. Hmmm…well that sounds a little crazy, but they can kind of go there. I keep forgetting that these kids, even though they are almost all 12, have never made a pinch pot, or done a coil pot, or built a slab tray or even used air-dry clay. Most of them have never, ever been taught in the course of a regular school year to get their hands into real clay. In about a week, after they’ve worked on researching their individual subject, I “approve” their design. This year our theme is State Symbols, so they find birds, flowers, trees, bugs, and even firearms. That last one was quite the coup, since students are technically not allowed to draw weapons, but he found a way. Resourceful young man. It was also quite a challenge, being a muzzle-loader long gun, which does not fit well into a four-inch square. He got a wonderful dose of problem solving, thinking on his feet, working and adapting to the circumstances, patience and focus. Actually, ALL of the students got some mega-doses of all those skills and more. The student who wanted to do the Texas Bluebonnet drew a lovely pencil rendition of that complex flower. She got her wet square of clay to work on, and a slab of clay to cut out and build the relief of her design. When she cut the design out of the paper, it looked mostly like a lumpy bunch of…well, lumps. Problem solving, thinking on her feet, adapting to circumstances. I asked her, “How are you going to solve this?” She looked back at me. I said, “Pick up the clay, play with it. See what it will do.” She did, I turned my back to talk to another student, and next thing I know, she had an amazing relief of a Texas Bluebonnet she accomplished by cutting individual pieces out of her little flat patty of clay, and sticking them onto her wet tile. Her neighbor says, “Wow! That is so cool! How did you do that?” And we’re off.
More art for more kids
Grand Junction, Colorado is one of those western towns that can’t really decide if it wants to be progressive or good ol’ boy. Maybe the longtime residents just ignore us newbies (anyone who has been here less than 30 years is pretty much a newbie) and go on just doing what they do. Ranching, mining, farming, hunting, fishing, going to church and loving the occasional air show. But downtown Grand Junction tells a story of people who have kept culture and art alive for over 100 years, over 200 miles from any city of any size, and from those cities, another several hundred miles to the NEXT city of any size. Distances are in days out here. I grew up in a town the size of Grand Junction, but in California, where cities aren’t separated by long stretches of desert and towns are blips along a very lonely highway. In California, it’s easy to find a place where art and music are never even questioned as to whether they should be within reach of any average person. This town, like most towns in the West, was a wagon-stop, a train watering stop, a gathering place around rivers and between mountains. Our downtown shows its history in old brick and stone buildings, in the railroad yard and silos. The difference is that in 1962, when small cities all over the country were looking at all kinds of ways to stave off the death of their older downtown, Grand Junction made exactly the right choice in funding a walking business park on Main Street. Public art, along with shade trees and benches were central to the plan. Business people and residents saw that keeping a cultural identity and supporting local art was fundamental to maintaining pride and character in the community. That community pride and identity is one reason we landed here. We take anyone who comes to visit us downtown to see the wonderful buildings, unique restaurants and stores, and the public art on every street, every 15 or 20 feet. Nobody we’ve taken downtown has ever said “You have WAY too much art here!” It’s a point of pride. Make no mistake, this is still a western town, with ranches and pasture weaving into the fabric of close-in neighborhoods, and petroleum extraction and coal mining very much a part of everyday life. In 1980 Exxon came to town. Up in the mountains east of here, was oil shale, and Exxon wanted it. The scale of their plans were truly mind-boggling. A new airport, a whole shopping mall and five brand-new schools, and that was just the beginning. Thousands of jobs, millions of dollars, a boom that would end Middle East oil dependency! People poured into Grand Junction, built homes and excitedly planned for shiny new schools for their children. But almost as soon as it began, it was over. Exxon pulled out, said “oops, we made a little mistake here…hehehe…we can’t afford to extract the oil from the shale. Our bad!” And just like that, the town emptied. Tax revenue tanked, and the schools scrambled to stay open. Little wonder they trimmed back to skeletal funding, and art education was one of the first programs to disappear. NOW we get to what I do every week. It didn’t take long for several members of this community who knew that art education is fundamental to a child’s growth to find a way to put it back into the elementary schools. Classroom teachers taught art as a part of their curriculum, but there were artists and college teachers and community members who wanted children to learn about important artists, who they were and how they shaped the world. Art Heritage was born. It started in one school, with a poster or two and a written biography of each artist. Slides were added, and a hands-on project. Music on tape
