A Day In the Life: Deep And Wide

( a clay mask I attempted recently, do not say anything)

Yesterday I was listening to a lovely Beethoven piece on the radio driving to get my daughter at her high school rather thrilled to get to Spring Break. Two Weeks...yeah!
(True I have something to go through...nothing to talk about in my health, but great to be out of teaching 1st grade awhile.) We were getting tired, kids and teacher.

Today I'm supposed to be getting over to see, and hear a great Music Festival ( 2nd Annual) my husband is putting on at Mesa Union School District in Ventura to promote music for children with area bands both young and old 10AM to 9PM. Last year it coincided with Syl's first college acceptances-man was that thrilling. I went last year in utter relief she had been so worried, accepted into CalTech and MIT among others it felt like a day to dance. Since she chose CalTech and loves it, things are still fine. It will be great to go over this year take some pictures, listen awhile to The Parachute Express, area High School bands like the Jazz Band coming from Pacifica her old school-led by Cathy Rogers, see Folklorico, listen to a rock band, see a Japanese drumming group associated with the Oxnard Buddhist temple, and I'll be just in time today for the high school bands. He has a secret for them, each is getting a lovely donated bongo/conga set. I'm excited about that. Last year, awesome drum kits. So it feels a part of the promotion of music in our corner of the world.
My contribution this year is easy, "staying out of the way."
We have a Lucy/Desi thing going.
I am respecting this by having a nice, fresh tomato sandwich and writing this for you.

Oh, yes, I was saying I was listening to a station on the radio in Santa Barbara in my car, dozing waiting for Sophia to appear when the gentle voice starting seeping into my dreaming talking about school instructional minutes.
Most of us do not dream about instructional minutes.
(Well, there are a few of the bloggers I read that might dream instructional minutes, but I'm hoping it's just the format and the ages-I once was listening to Alison- Elvis Costello and dreaming up black dead flower art images and ways to teach social justice...oh...in the day..)

What he was doing on the radio promoting an understanding to his classical listeners on Arts Education, KDB Santa Barbara on something I scribbled down as "Outlook," was talking to a report on how NCLB altered time in elementary schools on tasks. What he pointed out was the hours lost each week to music, social studies, science, art. I thought he said 5 hours lost a week. But the point of the blurb was to talk to narrowed curriculum generally. In areas where I teach, in under performing schools narrowing was more focused, more tuned up, there you might really state the subjects disappeared. So I was waking up to the DATA that some want to "look at." Or, I thought they said that.
A little excerpt:

“We knew that many school districts had made shifts in the time spent teaching different subjects since the No Child Left Behind was enacted, but we had little evidence of the magnitude of these changes within those districts,” said Jack Jennings, president and CEO of CEP. “Digging deeper into the data, we now know that the amount of time spent teaching reading, math and other subjects has changed substantially. In other words, changes in curriculum are not only widespread but also deep.”

Just as they so artfully planned.

While some may be delighted at reading math minute gains, it was a bit hard to listen to science, arts, music losses verified by this large study. Knowing that we embedded reading into these subjects, a foolish oversight of those demanding reading, knowing the integration was never counted. Knowing it will all fall out...and it will.
And will we account for this to something? Someone? What was hardest of all was knowing that the subjects cut, like social studies, music, promote the understandings that we need to inform anything at all we do, or to apply it, or really to understand it in a real world. I'm asserting narrowing burns kids by denying context and content as well as experiential knowledge, but I'm not afraid of being called to task. The study shows this. So. That's it in a nutshell.
What meaning comes forward for others, I shudder to think how this, like many things the last few years, will be dressed up to sound like a good thing.

Oh, it verified the NARROWING I was once talking about writing here. Something with ramifications for our young children. Serious ones.

I'd rather like to look away from narrowing towards a book I've meant to highlight.

Children, Clay, And Sculpture (Hardcover)
by Cathy Weisman Topal

"If a dream is the process of unconscious to conscious, clay is earth in hands; our forms and our functions, the act of making finding who we are." well, me

All of the books on children and art that I've read by Catherine Weisman Topal have been the best I've seen to early art experiences in schools/homes. how to do it, why, written in a way that is worth preserving as a dialectic.
YOU must check them out.
I've talked to her work here before.

Wish I could find more info.on her to share; it seems she is a Prof. to teachers. I hope that her students and readers go out to speak to the values of arts in education.
To why narrowing curriculum to exclude this work with children in elementary school is exponential deprivation because of what we do know about the brain development in the child. The loss of music, art, science, I think applied math, and better quality creative instruction, is a problem waiting to explode. And as I see it far more narrowed in areas of poverty and need; it becomes a form of classism. Those with money have the arts/science/experiences, those without money do not.
That's really not much to brag about in public education change.

Definitely these books excellently informed my work as a 1st grade teacher. If I could recommend them all, to anyone working with their own children, or within an instructional setting, these would be the ones to get. ASAP

Her other two books, Beautiful Stuff: Learning with Found Materials, and Children And Painting, build foundational knowledge of how to actually work with paint or found objects with children, and this one too, is really dedicated to the various issues in working within clay, ceramics, 3 dimensions with children. Slowly, carefully she is raising the sculptural foundational issues into understandable language, and with great pictures and practice helping you break down the way to move students, young students, into this important area for creative understandings. Building the language of form and functionality.

I read this last, of the three books, perhaps with my own biases. But it was a good order. When art expanded into sculpture and into clay in my own artistic life, both as child and adult, it brought with it concerns and understandings that were difficult for me.
And I'll share like any unfed thing much withered and died in my capacities in these dimensional areas, so I start over as an adult watching children to recapture the elements. Basic principles of form, structure re-grew for me years later making the forms of Buckminster Fuller as I took my 6th grade class through his artifact making laid out for kids. I began to see the value of application into forms. (I began ) to see we craft and we describe in actual space to elicit the ways to build, measure, forming in the real world we inhabit as a space of action, of plane of existence. My daughter just finished building this fantastic Gothic structure in a few weeks for a party for her House at CalTech, watching the kids make the structure, the paintings, take on the construction told me a great deal about the types of learning in this place. I saw the wisdom of this book lift into form in 18 year olds....see this here. In the book I saw the aesthetic concerns come to bear on pieces, the functional considerations as children took those on much like all humans take them on, in the process of understanding this earth bound plane, it's rules if you will. I still see this as applied math, as applied science, the place science, math, art meet.
Then I understood that in designing- the actual earthly considerations of weight, arch, height, design became manifest into the projects and synthesized into the child's adaption of the vocabulary of the piece....in other words applied art becomes a basis for much later conception of making. Ah....I see.
And Topal does a wonderful job of explaining this within her pages in ways that are designed to build to aesthetic meaning.

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Taken in a place with no name (See more photos here)

My spouse who read and responded to this volume 1st with his love of making in forms...he found it terrific. Applied it immediately into teaching students in handbuilt pots. My point that the rightness of using clay with my students, how to, the growth of their capacities so that they can visualize and have understandings from this dimensional work-that truth I better appreciated with her work. Again human right stuff. Her writing here was able to break down the process for teaching, recalling it to mind from my earlier art ed training at WVU under Bill Thomas and with Sharon Goodman.
This year I was concerned with her painting book, next year -because I've located a kiln I can get to- I'm going to have weekly projects in clay, wood scrap and found object, as well as building in this 3rd dimension. I'll use this book entirely for structuring and then reflecting on what my 1st graders have been doing.
Here with some photo's of clay things being made in my spaces...