Archive for January, 2012
Leave Those Kids Alone
Reposted from The Huffington Post
By Brian D. Cohen
When my daughter was entering fifth grade, we went around visiting all the private and public school options within a 45-minute drive of our home in rural Vermont. Most distinctive, and in many ways the most appealing of the schools, was a Waldorf middle school. I liked what I saw until the art teacher expounded an elaborate unified field theory of child artistic and psychological development that forbade students from using the color black, and I said, c’mon, we’re leaving. I didn’t really care if my daughter used black in her artwork or not, that was her choice, but I thought that keeping black away in the name of an abstruse grown-up theory was too much for a fifth-grader. She went to public school instead, where they didn’t have much art at all, so maybe I was being stubborn and willful to my daughter’s detriment.
When we get too directive or overbearing about play and the arts, we can take more away from kids than we give them. Sometimes we have to leave our kids alone to play, and not obsess, belabor, hover or cajole like tiger mothers of the imagination.
What is the role of play in education? A recent study of 300 children from working-class families found: “The ones that emerged as most creative …used their play as work,” says Stanford professor Shirley Brice Heath. “They were very difficult to disengage from play. To a person, they disliked, avoided, subverted education if it was not related to what they saw as their interests.” ‘Science Looks at How to Inspire Creativity’ by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, December 14, 2011 (Vol. 31, #14, p. 1, 16).
To oversimplify this a bit, kids do best when they want to learn; when what they learn is recognizably in their interests; when learning is fun; and especially when it’s challenging and engages them. In ‘Studio Thinking: How Visual Arts Teaching Can Promote Disciplined Habits of Mind,’ Ellen Winner observes that “focus and develop inner-directedness… (are) taught first and foremost by presenting students with challenging projects that engage them and require sustained work.”
Play as work? The arts involve play, not because the arts are easy, or even fun most of the time (and don’t say frivolous). Play in the arts is the exploration of patterns and relationships; the rehearsal of possibilities; the in-the-moment tactility, movement, sound, light, and awakening of the senses; the puzzle, thrill, and risk of learning a new form of expression, a new language; the excitement of observing and making sense of the world, the interaction of our stories, our feelings, our shared discoveries.
All good. But the outcome is indeterminate; success is uncertain; setbacks are inevitable; making progress is hard work; and the pathway is unfamiliar and not marked out in advance. Play is work.
I heard earlier this year about a woman named Lenore Skenazy who let her nine-year-old take the subway across New York City by himself, earning her the epithet “America’s worst mom.” I sort of admired her. We can’t control every aspect of our kids’ lives. Kids have to learn some things on their own; they learn that the answers they discover themselves have special value, because they don’t come easily.
When my daughter was a little older than nine (OK, a lot older), just for fun she and her best friend asked me to drive them blindfolded (them, not me) to an unknown location a half-hour from our house (this was Vermont, not NYC), and to drop them off so they could find their way back home, on their own (at that point they took off their blindfolds). I had driven them over to New Hampshire to disorient them. They made it back to the house in a little over an hour. I’m not sure how they did it. No doubt it took some ingenuity.
A lesson I learned early on as an art teacher is that the artwork your students make is not your own creation, not in the way the work you yourself create as an artist is. A teacher is more like the bad mom putting her son on the subway or like me driving the girls to someplace unknown; providing the challenge but not the ride home.
American Literature Students and the Thoreau Challenge
by Molly Newman, Humanities Faculty
When Henry David Thoreau moved to a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, what did he hope to discover? Never content with mediocrity, Thoreau hoped to find nothing less than the meaning of life: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
157 years later, my American Literature class considered Thoreau’s endeavor with a healthy mixture of suspicion and reverence. “If he wants to simplify, why are his sentences so complicated?” one student asked. Someone else quipped: “Didn’t his mom do all his laundry for him?”
I love hearing the kinds of responses Thoreau provokes from my students. Reading Walden should be an uncomfortable, polarizing experience. Thoreau calls our comfortable lives into question, and if we don’t squirm, then we just might be a bit complacent. While I hardly consider IAA students to be complacent, I do think that they
can lose sight of the bigger picture while they are busily rehearsing, creating, studying, and socializing. For this reason, I asked my American Literature students to take the Thoreau Challenge: for one week, they had to make a change that would, ideally, make their life more meaningful.
They embraced the project with zeal. Some students decided to wake up earlier and walk or run through the woods; some students became vegetarian or vegan; one student took up meditation; another chose to be silent. A group of four girls camped out next to my house for four days!
At the end of the week, none professed to find the meaning of life. I think many realized, however, that discovery is unpredictable. To an individual paying attention, possibility is everywhere.
Below are excerpts from the essays my students wrote about their experience.
The founder of Buddhism, Hindu Prince Gautama Siddhartha, said in one of his writings, “If a man’s mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.” After this experiment, I felt like my mind was more pure than before and for this reason I had the ability to appreciate everything around me more. Being a vegetarian became more than just staying away from meat, it became a cleansing experience that made me realize how fortunate I am to live at a place that is so full of life and peace. It gave me the opportunity to appreciate nature and to understand how I can use it to inspire me in my daily life. Since I was not eating meat, I started to become more aware of all of the wild life that we have in Idyllwild. I have always known that there are a lot of animals where we live; I just never took the time to really acknowledge them. This project helped me learn to be grateful for what we have here and to use this for motivation in my day-to-day life. –Mariana Barba Cid
As Thoreau said, “there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon”(890). I was unable to see the horizon ahead of me because I was the one holding myself back. I feel as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, and I can now see myself going to college.
Thoreau’s ways helped inspire me to make lifestyle changes that helped me in getting myself back on track. I was able to fully commit to this project for a week, going to bed earlier every night but one, and I never would have expected the outcome to be so rewarding. I was able to become a more centered and balanced individual, not hindering myself by pointlessly going to bed late. I had been hoping to be more productive during the day, but I was never expecting to be as efficient as I was. It gives me such satisfaction to say that I am almost done applying to college and that next year I can see myself at a university. Thoreau has helped me become a more successful individual and I think that anyone would agree that he is awesome for doing so. –Gabby DiMarco
Speech is a human connection going back to campfires and telling stories. It’s an outlet for thoughts and emotion. Not only was my “speechless” period relatively depressing because of the fact that I wasn’t talking to people (and when I did I punished myself), but I was missing an easy outlet for emotion. I wish I could say I noticed something I hadn’t seen before or had a groundbreaking epiphany, but I did not. The only thing I realized is that I should talk to more people. Make more of an effort for connection; show the garrulous side of Emiley Miller. When I wasn’t supposed to talk at all, it made talking to people I didn’t know much easier. –Emiley Miller
The biting cold made it difficult for me to want to write, to need to produce something tangible. It was not that I did not have the drive to write my thoughts down, but the idea of removing my hands from my pockets was terrifying. I found that I was content with the idea of my words remaining inside of my head, something which usually makes me uncomfortable. Removing my hands from my inner thighs, I reached for my cell phone. The screen was covered in thick condensation, which froze between the creases of my fingerprints. I had been lying awake for almost six hours; it was about a half an hour past four. When my alarm went off one hour later, I found it impossible to separate myself from my sleeping bag. –Rebecca Cox
Life is not about trying to never get a scratch from falling – it is about loving each scar because you will never get the same wound again. Failure is what makes us human – learning from that failure is what makes us successful humans. Taking risks will shove you forward, and even if you fall after, you still made it further than the person who stood still. Living – it’s the same as dancing – it doesn’t matter how many turns you can do, unless you mess up, you cannot get better. –Amira Lambert
So I sat in a sort of meditative state and just listened, trying to take in what nature had to say: the trees were alive, telling gossip and stories to one another. I heard the traveling songs of the leaves and they rustled along. I heard the playing of the woodland creatures, chatter of the nearby kids walking to class, and most important thing of all: nothing. I really enjoyed this day because I believed that it was very important to let Her get in a few words, instead of us talking all of the time. –Randy Plummer
Don’t forget to have fun with Transcendentalism. The whole point is to have a childlike view of the world full of innocence and wonder. I definitely got a little child-like. One of my favorite memories from this adventure was lying in the tent with Meg during the day and playing with her stuffed giraffe. One little thing would set us off into hysterical laughter. Maybe it was the exhaustion or maybe it was that we had successfully transcended and in turn regressed to our childhood selves. –Madison Gerringer
After reading all of my students’ essays, I was struck by how sincere they all were. I was reminded yet again of why I love teaching this adventurous bunch of aspiring young artists. Like Thoreau, they aspire to something transcendent. Their passion allows them to understand “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Drawing From Both Sides of Your Brain
The following is a repost from The The Huffington Post ARTS
by Brian D. Cohen
President, Idyllwild Arts Academy
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits… In art, there is room for all possibilities. — Pablo Picasso
Once, right after I had given an assignment for a drawing class, a student asked me which side of her brain she should use to make the drawing. I suggested she use whatever she had. Another student with whom I’d worked for a while, and knew to be right-handed, started drawing with her left hand in order to use the right side of her brain (which controls the left side of the body). She took things literally.
It got me to thinking about this sides-of-the-brain thing, a genuinely innovative idea from neuroscience, which, like so many valid scientific insights, got reified, oversimplified and misinterpreted by popular psychology. The book Drawing from the Right Side of Your Brain, wildly popular and in print since 1979, was loosely based on cerebral hemisphere research of the 1960′s. All of a sudden people started copying drawings upside-down and looking around for a gestalt. Pretty much everything the book says would have already been known and taught by any decent drawing teacher, but getting millions of people to draw when they didn’t think they could was remarkable.
A quick surf of the web reveals the following characteristics and capacities of the two sides of your brain:
Left Brain | Right Brain
Reality-based | Imaginative
Symbolic | Geometric
Mimetic | Risk-taking
Measuring | Spatial relations
Dexterity of the human right hand | Inventive
Planning | Concrete
Pattern perception | Perception of shapes and sizes
Conscious, externally-focused attention | Process ideas simultaneously
Looking at differences and distinctions | Sees relationships
Analytical | Synthesizing
Detail-orientation | Looks at the “big picture”
Enjoys observing | Sees more than one way of looking at things
Organizing information | Abstraction of qualities
Communicative | Gestural
(You are also told that if you happen to be a teacher, you’re left-brained; if you can explain your opinions in words, you’re left-brained; if you bother to read a how-to book, you’re left-brained; better put away thatDrawing from the Right Side of Your Brain book).
Drawing, or participating actively in any of the arts, demands the entirety of ourselves — these undertakings engage bodily, intellectual, analytical and emotional capacities. The act of perception itself — making sense of what you see — and the subsequent complex process of interpreting and translating to paper what you observe, are extraordinarily active and consuming tasks, and they require your whole brain. Drawing, like musical ability, is not a single ability, but a set of abilities, working simultaneously.
Let’s stop calling ourselves right- or left-brained, bad at art, bad at math; we share every capacity, albeit to varying degrees. Categorizing yourself just gets you off the hook. Leaving the arts to artists is like leaving exercise to athletes — you can do it, it’s good for you, and no one should fault you for not making a living at it.
In a recent study, David Navon of the University of Haifa asked brain-damaged patients to copy a picture in which 20 small copies of the uppercase letter A were arranged to form the shape of a large capital H: “Patients with damage to the left hemisphere often make a simple line drawing of the H with no small A letters included; patients with damage to the right hemisphere scatter small A letters unsystematically all over the page.” The two hemispheres of our brain, working in tandem, see both the small A’s and the big H. So use whatever you’ve got.
