I have really enjoyed this class. I have always loved music, dance and theater both watching and participating. I have also always loved looking at visual arts even though I have no talent for creating my own. I attribute much of my love for the arts to my mom and school.
I was one of the lucky kids. My parents always had music of all genres playing in our home. I was exposed to everything from Mozart and Baugh to the Beatles and the Carpenters. My dad played the flute and he had a friend that played the guitar. I always knew that I wanted to play an instrument. In fifth grade I learned the violin and in seventh grade I learned the flute. I don’t remember much about my schooling until fourth grade. The things that I do remember mostly revolved around the arts. I remember in about second grade learning the words to the song The Candy Man. I also remember learning about Hawaii. We made a book to put all of our activities in. I still have mine. We made lays, colored a picture of King Kamahi Mahi and did salt dough replicas of the Island. I also remember making my mom a candle for Christmas. In the upper grades, fourth through sixth, my elementary school was set up very much like a junior high. For half of the day we had home room which consisted of all the language arts. I still remember righting haiku poems and halving to memorize a poem of my choice. I still have that poem memorized but can’t find the book I got it from. The second half of the day we traveled. We had a different teacher for Social Studies, Math, PE, Music and Art. My art teachers name was Miss Zeminick. She taught us how to work with clay, fire it, paint it, glaze it and fire it again. We worked with paper mashie and one activity we started by drawing a picture of something we were studying in science, then we made our own carbon paper, after that we traced our picture onto a surface that now I don’t know what it is, but it seemed like it was some kind of soft, clay, tile. Then we took a carving tool and carved out our picture, the next step we inked our carving then put a piece of paper over it and rubbed. Each step had a final product but the final, final product was our stamp.
In music we learned to sing as a choir, play simple instruments and perform in front of our peers. Every year at the end we would have a talent show. The top three winners in each class would then perform for the final awards assembly for the year. In sixth grade I was chosen. I was petrified but for the past three years our teacher made us perform in class to prepare us for real world experiences.
Once a year for an entire semester in our PE class we square danced. I loved it. I was not the most athletic person and did not like playing flag football or basket ball. But when it was time for square dancing a looked forward to gym class. Almost every year without fail there were more girls than boys so the teacher chose me to be his dance partner. This was the only time I felt special and had high self efficacy in school.
Isn’t it interesting that my most vivid memories of grade school come from the arts? Our text and many other resources talk about how important the arts are for learning. As I have observed several classes I have noticed that some teachers are doing a great job of integrating the arts into their curriculum. I saw a school were PE was no longer a part of the curriculum so the teacher used theater and PE combined to get to the students. It was a guided improve similar to the TV show whose line is it Any Way. Most of the students really had fun and got to stretch their muscles and get a cardio work out at the same time. But I have also noticed that most teachers have almost no arts in their classroom. I have also noticed how much this has hurt the students in other academic areas especially Language arts. The students have a very difficult time tapping in to the creative part of their brain to write a tall tale or a piece of fiction. They are fine to write about something that happened to them over the summer but ask them to write about a made up kingdom and they are paralyzed. I have noticed that the lack of arts is also hurting most teachers’ ability to teach and have classroom management. They tend to only teach by direct instruction because they’re not sure how to do it any other way. I like how Dr. Escalante showed us how a teacher started out teaching creative movement to his students by reading it directly from someone else’s lesson plan or book. But over time, as he got more comfortable with it himself, he branched out and started coming up with his own lessons. He now is a traveling lecturer, teaching teachers how to integrate creative dance into their lessons.
I hope as teachers we are never to self contuse to try new things and never to seasoned to keep learning and growing ourselves. We need to set the example for our students and our peer teachers.
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