Art for Art's Sake

Prof. Gerry Sussman said, “Being smart in the arts is the same as being smart in engineering is the same as being smart in writing is the same as being smart in anything, really. It’s the ability to manipulate all the pieces of the puzzle in your mind, try to fit them together, and when they don’t fit quite right … you sand the edges/corners and make them all fit.”

Teaching your students about art is a good idea:

It's been proven that early exposure to visual art, music, or drama promotes activity in the brain.

Art helps children understand other subjects much more clearly—from math and science, to language arts and geography.

Art nurtures inventiveness as it engages children in a process that aids in the development of self-esteem, self-discipline, cooperation, and self-motivation.

Participating in art activities helps children to gain the tools necessary for understanding human experience, adapting to and respecting others' ways of working and thinking, developing creative problem-solving skills, and communicating thoughts and ideas in a variety of ways.

The arts are not so much a result of inspiration and innate talent as they are a person's capacity for creative thinking and imagining, problem solving, creative judgement and a host of other mental processes. The arts represent forms of cognition every bit as potent as the verbal and logical/mathematical forms of cognition that have been the traditional focus of public education (Cooper-Solomon, 1995).

The British aesthetician and critic, Herbert Read, went so far as to say, "Art is the representation, science is the explanation… of the same reality" (Fowler, 1994). The arts are able to teach divergent rather than convergent thinking and encourage children to come up with different, rather than similar, solutions because the solutions to artistic problems are multiple.

The arts break through the black-and-white, true-false, memorise-that, name-this that cause Eisner concern. This kind of reasoning is far more the case in the real world, where there are often many ways to address a problem and, "An effective work force needs both kinds of reasoning, not just the standardized answer" (Fowler, 1994).

In his music advocacy speech at the 1996 Grammy Awards, Richard Dreyfuss announced, "It is from that creativity and imagination that the solutions to our political and social problems will come. We need that Well Rounded Mind, now. Without it, we will simply make more difficult the problems we face" (Dreyfuss, 1996).

The results of balancing the arts with other learning areas in the curriculum have shown that where 25% or more of the curriculum is devoted to arts courses, students acquire academically superior abilities (Perrin, 1994), demonstrating an apparent relationship between learning in the arts and other areas. Perrin also refers to long-term educational aims, saying that workers at all levels in our post-industrial society need to be creative thinkers and problem solvers and able to work collaboratively, they must be judicious risk-takers, they must be able to push themselves towards high levels of achievement, and they must have the courage of their convictions, and that arts education develop such skills. Perrin suggests that these attributes are nurtured in the arts because "the student artist (musician, dancer, visual artist, writer, or actor) learns by doing" (Perrin, 1994).

We may agree with Einstein and Iris Murdoch and also with Polanyi, that "we can know more than we can tell" (Polanyi, 1967). There are, though, other ways of "telling" besides verbal language. The arts as ways of knowing are as potentially powerful as any other form of human discourse and they are just as capable of contributing to the development of the mind on a conceptual level (p.48).

The key learning area of the arts is able to provide children with unique and multiple ways of exploring, forming, expressing, communicating and understanding their own and others’ ideas and feelings. It provides students with the skills and knowledge necessary to understand how the arts reflect and depict the diversity of our world, its cultures, traditions and belief systems. The procedures within the arts can contribute to the development of the potential of the whole child by proving children with the opportunity to:

Develop the full variety of human intelligence

Develop aesthetic awareness and perception

Develop the ability for creative thought and action

Develop an understanding of cultural change and differences

Develop feeling and sensibility

Develop physical and perceptual skills

Explore values, and

Achieve positive self-esteem (Commonwealth of Australia, 1995)

The future of this world rests upon the shoulders of its youth. It is our responsibility as adults and educators to ensure we do all in our power to aid the development of children’s potential. Equity in educational opportunity is essential if society is to tap all the possible resources in the shaping of its future, and the arts are an integral and undeniable part of this development of potential.

Thoughts on simplicity...

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
~Albert Einstein

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Simplicity is about finding the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Context often distorts good analysis of a problem. That’s why finding the obvious isn’t all that obvious! The challenge is simplifying the problem - and thus finding the purest, simplest and most obvious solution!

Simplicity is about subtracting the redundant, and adding the meaningful.

HOW SIMPLE CAN YOU MAKE IT?

HOW COMPLEX DOES IT HAVE TO BE?

The process of reaching an ideal state of simplicity can be truly complex. The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.

"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity."

~Albert Einstein

"The will to win...the will to achieve...goes dry without continuous reinforcement."

~Vince Lombardi

I have been reflecting a little on what stops me from being as successful at sport today as I (like to think I was) 30 years ago. It all comes down to desire and self-dsicipline. Sure life priorities and old age come into it. Priorities is just an excuse though. I could hit the hay earlier, get up earlier and do the ten k thing again - if it was my priority, it I could re-summon the self-discipline. Old age is just an excuse too. Sure the reflexes are a little slower, but that's where experience and an old head can compensate - anticipation compensating for reaction speed.

Brian Tracy is one of America's leading authors on the development of human potential. He said this..."If I had to pick the #1 key to success, it would be...self-discipline. It is the difference in winning or losing; between greatness and mediocrity.

Self-discipline is the key to personal greatness. It is the magic quality that opens all doors for you, and makes everything else possible. With self-discipline, the average person can rise as far and as fast as his talents and intelligence can take him. But without self-discipline, a person with every blessing of background, education and opportunity will seldom rise above mediocrity.

My question is how much are we encouraging our children and supporting our children to be self-disciplined? It's so easy to do things for them, to make excuses for them, to offer them the 'easy option'. I'm not advocating child cruelty, boot-camps, or bully tactics to live vicariously through my child's success at something I'd wished I could do or could do better.

No, I mean expecting kids to make a bit of an effort, a genuine commitment to seeing things through. How many kids give up stuff without even giving it a good go?

The most important success principle of all was stated by Thomas Huxley many years ago. He said, "Do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not."

That's self-discipline. That's what I need to work on, that's what I am going to encourage in my son as supportively but persistently as I think is right.

"No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated and disciplined."

~Harry E. Fosdick

Thin End of the Wedge

There is a Chinese farewell I often reflect on, "may you live in interesting times". We are. Problem is we are so full on, living lives that are so crowded, multi-tasking most every minute of the day.

Our school Mission is "Dream, Grow, Shine". Dream represents Goal Setting. Grow represents our Action Plan to achieve the Dream. Shine is the Success Criteria - also what we will be doing or seeing when the goal is achieved. We missed a vital component though. Shining light usually Reflects - and reflection is the missing piece in our cycle of learning and achieving.

It's also the most missed piece in the puzzle that is our daily life.

Look at what is happening in the USA at present. General Motors has sucked billions in life-line funding and is still going down the gurgler. Our own economy is in a dire state, and what are we told? Consumption is the way out. We need to consume more. We need to get our mojo back and start putting things on the plastic again.

Hang on a minute - stop the bus just for a moment please. How much stuff do we need? How does spending more on more stuff (and I am such a black kettle here) help the bigger problem, which is not the economy (stupid - from Clinton's campaign), but is the fate of our world.

Al Gore might be seen as an annoyance and a bit of a geek, but he's on the money. If we stop global warming now, today, totally, it will still take 300 years before any noticeable difference is made to our world. 300 years!

Stop the bus? - it's already too late.

We have a goal of developing life-long learners - maybe we should be focusing on how to grow life-long livers.

Have you heard of Global Dimming? Scientists were worrying about the effects of pollution, con trails and so on causing a dimming of the sun's rays here on earth. We need to address this they say - check out Bangkok where thanks to Global Dimming, you never see a 'blue' sky or the sun. But hang on, other scientists have just analysed the data for the week immediately post 9/11. What did they find - the total ban on flights in that period caused a spike in Global Warming. Damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Clearly we are living in Challenging Times - and clearly the challenges are set to get much bigger. What we need is some very deep thinking, and some pretty serious forward planning.

What we get is quite different. Governments are elected for such a short term, it is not in their interests to take the long term view. You need to grab voter attention by hitting the right nerves - harsher penalties, bash the bludgers, oh and National Testing.

The solution , if it comes, will come from Left Field. It will come from Thinking Differently. It will not come from our schools though, because we will be too busy ensuring all our children meet the "standards" so that we can keep our funding.

Literacy and Numeracy are not the key to addressing the challenges we are facing. Focusing on Flockton's "Evil Twins" will rob us of the opportunity to delve deeply, to think deeply, to question, to challenge, to trial and make errors.

I fear for the world my seven year old son is set to inherit. I continue to hope that someone, somewhere will say 'stop the bus', and someone somewhere will listen.

The thin end of the wedge - that comes in my next post.

Why iTouch

One of my most important roles is to find and employ the very, very best people.

Next most important is getting the best people to do the right thing - not usually that hard to achieve.

Next most important is to hang on to those best people and ensure there is continued employment for them.

That implies keeping kids and gaining new kids - for us that means ensuring year 7/8s don't leave for intermediates.

That means we need to offer a compelling teaching team - tick - and a compelling point of difference - the plan.

One of the cornerstones of the new Curriculum Document is inculcating a ‘life-long learning’ attitude in our children (I would say learners).

This attitude comes from awakening interest and arousing passion. This ensures engagement, and leads to attitude change, even paradigm shifts in individuals.

Our pre-teens are a very different creature in this the age of digital natives. They expect to have their phone with them all the time, and to be constantly connected to several ‘friends’ at any given time. They expect - grudgingly - to have to ‘power down’ for class, and often powering down becomes more a case of switching off.

Sharing a computer is not cool. The internet is a one to one experience. When you find something cool, I want to go to it on my portal devise, not yours, and you want that too. We don’t say to kids, here class, share these four books between you today as you all do your work. We don’t have a queue waiting to use the class pencil! So why do we have one, maybe two computers in a typical classroom?

Engage me or enrage me is the challenge according to Prensky. Sylwester says we have 18 seconds to engage the limbic system or the brain goes elsewhere for stimulus. For many, the curriculum is there to be delivered, and whether it is consumed, devoured or, more often, ignored like greens on a five year old’s dinner plate, is up to the ‘consumer’ student.

Many may feel this is not ‘right’. They may feel that discipline is needed and punitive measures should be applied. The harsh reality is, we cannot compel anyone to do anything against their will. You can lead a learner to water but you cannot force them to drink.

So what then?

How about something radical. Instead of asking, “how do we stop these kids texting all day?”. Why not ask, “how can we support them to use their exceptional texting skills to assist them to learn?”

It’s all a matter of perspective. A river always finds its own way to the sea. We need to help our learners find their own way, not ours. My ways are not your ways. It may be useful for you to see how my ways can work for me, and equally me to see how your ways work for you. I should not expect there to be one way, and that to be mine.

So we need to use new technologies - they’re natives, that’s what they do most of their waking, non schooling hours.

We need to make it engaging - appealing to their emotions, relating to their world-experience, their dreams and their perspective.

We need to encourage them to problem solve their own way to the solution. Our world has huge problems that require totally new thinking if they are to be solved, resolved or adjusted to.

They need information that is relevant, real, and up to the minute. Text books are mostly out of date the day they are written, never mind the day they get into kids’ hands.

They need their own one to one portal to the world - to communication that is more immediate than email. To knowledge that is up to the minute not up to last century. They need tools that encourage them to practice through fun - games, challenge, levels of difficulty, inherent rewards, collaboration etc.

So what is the answer?

It is clear to me that we cannot find the funds for class sets of laptops for all. So we need to find the next best thing... iPod Touch.

More soon