March 15, 2013
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ArtWorks
For the past three years I have participated in a program called “ArtWorks” which is put on by the local schools. For a day fourth graders are bussed to Glen Oaks Community College where they break into groups and go to a series of three classes to meet artists who work in some field of art. There are beaders, stained glass makers, painters, one gourder… So three times during the day slightly less that 20 students with two chaperones file into my classroom and I have 40 minutes to entertain them, educate them about gourds and try to keep them from painting the ceiling.
I have no teaching skills whatsoever. I was going to go into education, forty years ago, but when I graduated I realized I had forgotten to take the actual education classes. Which meant I didn’t have to student teach, which came as such a profound relief to me that I sensed, in my deep and intuitive way, that I was never meant to be a teacher.
I have lived with this decision quite happily my entire adult life. The only life decision I have celebrated any more happily is my accidental failure to pursue my nursing degree. Every now and again someone bleeds in front of me or exposes some deep, gaping hole where smooth flesh should be, and I begin dancing again: Thank GOD I’m not a nurse…
With any luck there is an entire generation of women who have no idea why I chose those two fields not to go into. One, because it would be wonderful to have teachers and nurses–life would be miserable for the rest of us without them. But as a historical footnote, when I approached a guidance counselor (as required, I would never have ventured near one on my own) in high school, she helped me choose my path through life. She said, “Well, you can always get work as a teacher or a nurse.”
Say that to any woman in their sixties and watch them nod in recognition.
We were the last of the rush of the Baby Boomers, the world’s single largest generation. This means that as we came of age and began looking for careers, there were fewer children younger than we were instead of more (apparently for the first time in known history.) Teaching jobs vanished *poof*. Nursing jobs dried up and blew away. *Poof*. Within a decade those two professions became The Most Useless Degrees Available.
Anyway. I’m not a teacher. Apparently I will correct your grammar in a heartbeat (and not even hear myself do it) but I have no particularly well-honed skills when it comes to dealing with kids. (Another career I forgot: I never actually had any children of my own.) I think they’re cute. I like to hold babies for five or six minutes. For some strange reason I have a real hard time hearing children when they speak, and the one thing I have learned is that if you ask a child to repeat something, the next time they say it will be softer than the first, until they have their heads tucked down against their chests and they’re muttering into their shoelaces.
So the kids come into my class, take their seats, I give them a short history of gourds, what they are, where they came from, why they are important to the history of civilization (which, interestingly enough, appears to be something most school children learn just before fourth grade and then forget by the time they are adults.) And then I give them each a gourd and let them paint it.
In my mind, this might take hours.
We (I am assigned assistants to help me with this) give each child a paper plate with a dollop of three different colors of acrylic paint.
As an adult, I look at the paint given and think to myself, This should last through all three classes.
The children pick up their brushes and spend at least 5 minutes painting the stem of their gourd.
I think, Oh, Lord, they’re never going to get this done…
And a little voice rings out: “Can we mix the paints?”
Why would anyone say ‘no’ to that? The whole point of an art class is to bring out creativity and a sense of adventure: trying to inflict rules and order on an art class is just insane. So I say, “Sure.”
And 18 children re-create the color brown. They paint the plates, they create swirls and color blobs and ridges and sooner or later some child has both hands in there and acrylic paint smeared up to both elbows and someone splatters her ArtWorks t-shirt and someone else drops paint on the floor and the gourds, which began as modest one-color, painstakingly stained works of art become three dimensional layered, re-surfaced highways and byways of acrylic paint, and then in rapid order the children need:
–to wash their hands
–paper towels to wrap their gourds
–more gourds
–different colors of paint
–clean water for their brushes
–to take the paint plates home
–to show me, the chaperones, each other and the kids down the hall their gourds
They come alive with enthusiasm and joy. They paint each other. They compare gourds and what each student’s gourd looks like. Inevitably, one of them needs a second gourd. In the last class, I hand out gourds like candy because I have enough and I will do anything humanly possible to avoid having 18 bored fourth-graders and a half a gallon of acrylic paint turned loose in my class room.
I think being a teacher must be a frustrating, challenging, sometimes over-whelming, sometimes heart-breakingly triumphant occupation. From what I have been able to observe, fourth graders are an eclectic bunch with a fairly broad range of maturity, abilities and social skills. They are completely alien to anything I have experienced or remember, and while I get a certain kick out of the class, I would never presume it’s anything I did. I turned them loose with three colors of paint, a surface to paint on, a dish of water, a brush and said, “Go for it.” They’re on a field trip, out of class: it would be hard to blow a gig with a set-up like that.
And every year I think, “My class has to be the least creative, most boring class they attend all day.” I worry that because they come to my class, where they encounter an adult who is insanely kid-dumb, they waste a third of their day. And I fuss and fuss, trying to come up with a more creative, challenging program. Or paint that will at least BEGIN to dry before they have to bag their project. And every year I sigh, “I’m not doing this again.”
Did you really LOOK at the gourd above? She did that by mixing her paint in swirls and then rolling the gourd in the paint, so instead of making brown, she made these lovely swirls of color. She’s eleven. She did three gourds in slightly under 30 minutes. I keep thinking, I’m an adult: I could make some really cool swirls if I had some paint and a plate and a little patience
I’m not sure what it all means. I’m not sure if I’ll do it again next year.
I hope they had fun.
