I’m Myzah De Guzman and I’m 7 years old. This is my story, “The Little Whale.” I did the character illustration while my brother Mazen did the illustration background and animation. https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/The_Little_Whale.mp4 Myzah De Guzman, age 7, United Arab Emirates
elementary art
Flying under the radar
When you want to get something done, is it better to just keep your head down and go a little underground, or is it better to make some noise and get all that attention and potential support? Danged if I know. One of my jobs is as an Artist In Residence, teaching fifth graders at one school about how to make clay tiles for an installation in their school. The other one is as Assistant Coordinator for a district-wide art program called Art Heritage. Art Heritage has been in existence for 33 years in the Grand Valley. We teach 150 or so volunteers (parents, grandparents, passionate community members) to bring art instruction units into 23 schools, to over 9000 elementary students. We train them and give them resources they can use to teach about the artist, their genre and their historical context, as well as to present an art project for the students to do, inspired by that artist. But often even parents whose kids have received the benefit of the Art Heritage Program, really have no clue what we do, especially if they have never volunteered for us. Then there are people who politely ask what exactly do you do again? It’s something like art? Do you teach kids? I work at saying it all in just a few words, so I don’t see their eyes dart away, already not really listening. It’s okay, I don’t really listen when my computer guy tells me what he did so my laptop will run again. It’s my job to make the projects and supplies accessible not only to the volunteers, but to the students they will teach. At times, it’s a little like that old game of “telephone.” I say something in the training class, our volunteers hear that and take it back to the classroom, where sometimes it comes out, well, a little wonky. So part of my job is to be very clear, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, when I present a project. Give them specific directions but give them leeway to use their own ideas. Spark an inspiration that will fire up in the classroom. Check out these Picasso faces–all different, all completely individual, and all totally valid answers to the challenge. Art Heritage’s original format was lengthy, very wordy, and used slides (you remember slides?) to show students the work of great artists. My predecessors worked out of their homes, storing supplies in a tiny closet and handing out mimeographed sheets to the volunteers. Over the years the program has developed into something quite a bit larger and more technologically adept. We now use Powerpoints and videos embedded in our website. We inhabit an office and about 250 square feet of warehouse space, plus our “Shed of Wonders” that houses a seemingly endless supply of paper (we are very good at scrounging donations from printshops.) I have been the Assistant Coordinator for eight years, and my supervisor has been the Coordinator for nearly 20. In that time, we have grown my job from simply putting the necessary supplies in boxes to send out to schools and speaking for a few minutes at Training about the art project, to a “real” job. At first I was a contract worker. Now I am paid a reasonable wage as a Paraprofessional, sometimes known as an Artist in Residence. Which sounds like I live in a warehouse, with boxes of oil pastels, colored pencils, markers and glue surrounding me. What I really do is spend a lot of time researching artists and resources to develop a project around those artists. Here’s my Audubon project, some credit to Pinterest, but mostly down to getting my hands painty and grubby, trying to think like a 7-year-old. Some days I feel like I’m being paid for something I love to do anyway, and other days, I know I’m seriously underpaid. The days with paint and paper and oil pastels, I think maybe I’m having too much fun. The days I move several hundred pounds of paper, markers, paint bottles and glue, I think I’m either underpaid or overage. We see about 150 volunteers, six times a year, for an all-morning training meeting in which we present all our labors of love, the units of study on significant and important artists. We present them with a fully-developed art project that honors that artist’s vision. Each volunteer needs to bring only a heart for putting more art in a child’s day, an understanding and passion for how important that is to each child’s development, and a willingness to try. We provide all the information, the support, the supplies, and the permission to experiment and think like a child again. One of my behind-the-scenes jobs is to procure, inventory, maintain and distribute all the supplies we need for those lessons. We train those volunteers, but they bring the lesson to about 9000 students. Six times a year. Do the math. Many, many reams of paper, lots of pints of paint, big class sets of oil pastels…it is a physical job, shifting all that into and out of each school’s supply box. We almost never see administrators in our corner of one of many school support buildings, where we plan and organize and brainstorm and bang out biographies and art projects around Dale Chihuly or Mary Cassatt. I see them even less than my supervisor does. She is half-time, I am barely 30 hours a month. I keep my head down most of the time, though. My job is not to shmooze with admin, but to figure out how much paint we’ll need for thousands of kids to paint birds like Audubon did. I like it that way. Sometimes I really want all our administrators to come to Training and see what we do. To watch these amazing volunteers talk about students who mob them in the hallway when they know the Art Heritage cart is coming to their room. I want them to hear about the kids
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
