Blog Entry
the point.
October 14, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I work for an organization that has a roster of about one hundred artists. We book these artists at schools to teach kids about the arts. I’m talking about jazz drumming, improv inspiring, traditional Chinese theater performing, kitemaking, poetry-writing, Salsa dancing, hip-hop history sharing, printmaking-using-our-hands leading, bleeding heart, ultra-liberal, classic starving artists.
And some of them are “better” than others. One of my favorites has worked with autistic people for nearly thirty years. She has a saucy short silver haircut, wears tribal earrings, and drums. Say wha-? Well, she brings in a bunch of drums, puts them in the hands of people who may not otherwise communicate at all, and by the end of an hour, she has half of them pounding out a rhythm. After three hours together she may have most of the room. Doing this for us last year with a group of developmentally disabled students, she watched one, who had never spoken, speak. Inspired by that, we combined her program this year with dance and visual arts classes, all rhythm-themed.
We have a new intern, fresh from art school. I went with her this afternoon to photograph and one of these drumming workshops. The visit was easily the most awesome thing I’ve witnessed since I swam in the Mediterranean last summer. I’ve talked with this teaching artist several times before, she’s met and fallen in love with my mom, and I’ve seen her drum. But I’ve never seen her lead twenty-three disabled youth, between the ages of twelve and twenty, shaking maracas, rattles, beating on African and snare drums, improvising, developing and maintaining beats.
Afterward the intern and I asked her how she was doing. She said she needed inspiration, she was feeling unchallenged, and that affected the kids’ experience. Most of them were shaking or beating something, about half freely creating their own rhythms or successfully maintaining the group beat, and this was only after three or four weeks. But she wasn’t satisfied that several more classes of the same would cause all of them to break on through to the rhythm side.
I told her I’d put my thinking cap on and put her in touch with the other artists in the program, in case they could cross-pollinate. The intern and I got in the car, I pulled out of the school parking lot, and the intern asked, “So… with this program… what is the goal?”
I stuttered and stammered my way through an answer, hiding my disgust at the question as best I could. The goal, I told her, was to give them a brush, drum, dance step or line of poetry, and the opportunity to do something with it. Sometimes schools had funding to pay for several sessions with an artist, so they could work with students often enough to build to a performance or larger artistic piece. But even then, the goal was to create that- nothing more. She accepted this but added, “I thought the organization had a mission, so the programs would have that mission… to enrich curriculum…”
She was talking about programs we’ve based on subjects already taught in schools, such as the fourth and seventh grade focus on the Erie Canal. Our artists lead kids to write in the first-person as though they lived during the nineteenth century period when the Canal was a major shipping route. Programs like this, useful programs, are easier to get funded by large corporations through grants. No one wants to pay for a visual artist to just go in and spend half a year teaching kids poetry, but they’ll pay for something that relates to all that factual garbage the kids are already required to learn. It’s a sensible, functional, effective way to get our artists into schools, but it’s not how the organization started and it isn’t, when all is said and done, what usually happens. What happens was what happened today- kids get that tool in their hands and they start doing something with it. No teaching artist is going to tell a kid halfway through a class to think more about the history, math, or science, and less about the dancing, painting, or song.
All I said was, “That part’s always evolving,” as I turned off Main St. to drop her off at her house, perhaps with a little kick to make sure she exited the car super-quickly. “We’re creating more programs that support curriculum, but even then, it just supports it. It’s the arts, should there ever be a goal?”
Her agreement was half-hearted. I still have no idea what she was talking about and should have just asked her- what goal did you have in mind?
But her question, in our current educational system, is entirely logical. What is the point? Most educators and administrators would want to measure and classify them, per standardized goals. Goals that teach obedience rather than critical thinking, knowledge rather than wisdom: what year Lewis and Clark began their expedition, how to write a thousand words on a subject you’ve only studied for ten minutes, how to sit still at a desk for an hour.
Most things taught in school have no practical use in ordinary students’ lives. They could be said to have no goal. Teachers don’t show kids how to make their parents get along, their big sister treat them more nicely, their dad make more money at work, their crush pay attention to them, their shoes magically turn into the latest style, their hearts be less vulnerable or self-esteem higher. Particularly that last one.
Compare that to what you learn from the arts: to spin, jump, fly. To get things from your head and heart out of your head and heart onto paper. To express things vocally you could never just say- in song, you can say “I hate you” or “I’m angry” or “I don’t know how to fix this,” and no one will call you a weenie or a jerk or an idiot. To manipulate people, to calm down, to beautify one’s space. And whether you enjoy the particular art form being taught, or not, they all relate to each other, and any artist you meet may be the one who kneels down beside your desk, looks in your eyes, and gives you that specific compliment that your parents never bother giving you, that makes you draw when you could be drowning your sorrows in Doritos… do you see the beautiful cycle of life I’m sketching here?
I’m not basing this on theory, either. I know that doing craft projects with my grandma as a little kid are some of the happiest memories of my childhood. I know I still can’t hear “Through the Grapevine” without remembering the dance we all had to learn to it in the third grade. I know that the fourth grade teacher who required we write creatively every day introduced me to myself.
This afternoon, I watched a boy with Down Syndrome improvise a complex rhythm I couldn’t come up with after months of lessons. While the teaching artist, intern and I discussed the workshop, and the rest of the children put on coats to go home, this boy sat with us, pounding away. He’s been assessed and classified his entire life, written off by too many as incapable of contributing to our culture… or of meeting goals. But like any artist, he had something to say today, with his hands, and he had a chance to say it. I’ve been to the Village Vanguard, I’ve watched drummers at Washington Square Park, I can judge drumming as well as the next person- the kid was good. And today he had a chance to be good.
That’s the point.
