With Love For the Exceptional Art In Our Children, I Express My Concern

With Love For The Exceptional Art In Our Children, I Express My Concern

When I was in art school I took classes from Bill Thomas at WVU in Art Education. He used two books, Becoming Human Through Art and 100 Ways  To Have Fun With An Alligator.

The latter was a way to generate starting places for projects with art students.  One of the things I learned was how art is always embedded in real life. That is the purpose for it after all-a tool towards making meaning of that which cannot be spoken. It is inseparable from suffering, pain, living, and here into the recent school tragedy a father reminds me of this once more in talking about the loss of his beautiful artistic child.

I remember an image in the book of my art ed training. A pen and ink gun shooting a pen and ink flower. No, I don't recall the lesson-it would be about I think the juxtaposition of unexpected. Disarming our perceptions. Just as this father did for me offering his love to all, even through his pain, even to the family of the shooter. As too, we see the reality of the teachers, removed from the test frame that has been the only image in the dialogs, giving up lives as public servants. 

I could not find that drawing in the book on the new technological image memory on the net sadly. 

I found another I like as much as such a thing could be liked:

In a testimonial about his daughter, one father, who just had his daughter gunned down, spoke of her love for art. It was so deeply moving. If you can listen:

After teaching  in West Virginia two years in 1983 or so-in a marvelous setting-I went to teach in South Central LA in dangerous areas-first at Russell School then at 93rd Street School. I'm sorry to state this again as I have here before- no children deserved to be brought into the violence and poverty  I saw in those settings in the inner city of LA. Not a single child was remotely safe there, in America! One morning we drove to work by a huge automatic weapon in the middle of the street. Kept on going- with me saying over and over, "Oh my God, look." We did not have cellphones then, or phones in classrooms.  Once I saw a man swinging a huge sword as we drove in at 7AM, a huge one, like the Arabian Nights-to avoid the real possibility of being hurt we drove through a red light. He was swinging out into the streets at cars. Reginald Denny was beaten senseless in a place not far from my route home later on. One day coming out of Russell, after school was over that day-as Jack taught elsewhere and I waited for my then roommate- a SWAT team person threw me to the ground as I listened to pops in the parking lot-covering me totally to obviously protect my life. He was saving my life. A student entered my classroom later that year at 93rd armed with a big knife, an older teen, holding it to one child whose brother he seemed to know and wanted to exact some revenge. Inexplicably he left when a kid entered behind him coming back from wherever she went daily. I stood between the kids and him, trying to herd my class to the door in the back of the room, holding up a chair, as they resisted to go, running actually toward him to see what was going on. It was utter chaos. No one told me much there. 

No one answered the intercom, no phones, no way to safely communicate what happened to the office. And when I did later in the day I was just told it hadn't been that bad, they didn't call the police. Even though he also entered another classroom and clearly it HAD happened. The administration later called in my then boyfriend-who became my husband-admonishing him for asking for security(something he did not do especially vociferously just by raising a hand and asking) -threatening to transfer us both and put letters in our file- for pushing for security. 

It was a point of pride there to deny gangs existed.

This was followed by staff meetings where a furious administrator threatened us publicly for daring to suggest it was unsafe at the school-something the huge fences and barbed wire, chained parking lots, guard at the lot, bullet holes in the several inch thick classroom window glass and the PUBLIC statistics of the high violence rate in that block, and previous stabbing of a teacher all easily attested too. You did not say at 93rd Street School gangs were a threat. If you did say it,  they got tough with  you-that they "actioned." Jack was forced to remove every single thing from his walls suddenly-he had beautiful art there that taught bilingually a world of words. A first reality lesson that I often review in facing a career in public school in areas of crime and poverty.

Just enough from that incident being so personalized to us to get us moving to other work the following year. Long stories. I've written some of them here.
"I've seen Puglisi's come and I've seen Puglisi's go."
I still hear Mrs. Welford saying to Jack.

But I cannot tell the story of my own life now.
Oh no.

Just the same- over my career I've seen plenty of violent issues. A father upset over a CPS call by a nurse in Greenfield that came to school I believe to threaten my life-he blamed me for the nurses call-that appeared to change his mind after I gently talked to him with a small table between us for hours waiting for anyone to pass by to help me, armed with his knife at his side enclosed in his hand, no blade out though.  I could see it clearly by his side, and it took hours to get to a safe situation to call for help. 

Incidents including the shooting death of a former student. In another a  close friend, a Principal, faced a shooting person who was killed on his campus taking a student hostage with his gun, a block or so away from where I was teaching, and so many other things I forget and in moments like this recall like one recalls the history of Christmas ornaments randomly pulled from a box. 

A high school student a block away putting enough explosives in his house to blow away several city blocks.

Yes, I am a public school teacher.

I think because I taught first grade for so long I just am....almost beyond words about this recent shooting in Connecticut. I feel it certainly. In my bones. As I watch this father I think about the loss to the world of his beautiful artist.

May our love reach him.

My mother always says that creation/making/art is the development of construction, of intelligence, of meaning. As we played with my then 6 month old daughter Sylvia building block towers, years and years ago she would laugh and immediately knock them down- my mother, in her wisdom, would say...this is what a person does that cannot create. Before they gain the tools to make. She would say, do not forget this. If the young child cannot yet stack the blocks they CAN knock them down-and all beings do. Which is why we will help them learn to stack them, I hear her in my memory. If no one teaches this, then all they are left with is destruction. She went further. She would tell me in no uncertain terms that our role as the parent or teacher was as a mediator of creation.

(this is Feuerstein I think) She would say to me that for her it was why she brought art into our lives. Art is a puzzle sarah, it's learning how to imitate, to design, to make, to build, to see, to give, to cheer, to love, to use an instinct in a positive way. It is the tool forward, just like these blocks going a top each other represent these first steps toward the child gaining control over their motor skills-so too in art they are learning about making and doing through the construction of meaning.

To do anything less is to leave them with only destructive impulses.

She stated, teach with art.

It is a concrete realization of these ideas.

Making it knowable.

I have a very interesting mother.

I know that we see today in Connecticut a school that surely looks like it knows how to plan for security, for creation, it looks like the best of what public school might ever be, doing it all right.....with the funds and support to do it, the people to do it....they clearly review things with staff like where to hide kids, and for all of it- the fact that a clearly disturbed child with a gun loving Mom trumps all of that planning, this brought to mind something I can barely hold in my head.

It is time to discuss gun control.
(And mental health)

My cousin, in the deepest despair, struggling really-why allow her to buy a gun?
She took her life in an act of her utter despair.

Do we all need everything we might like?

Should someone in deep depression be allowed weapons?

How do we know?

How do we regulate?

Do we regulate?

Are we capable of denying ourselves something for a greater good?

And my husband tells me that Michigan,  I think, will allow teachers to carry concealed weapons.

I cannot imagine a more disturbing juxtaposition-a teacher and a gun.

Artless, utterly.