I don’t want your art.

I wrote this a while ago as a journal entry while I was an art teacher at Kiley Middle school. I'm posting it here, having found it again, as an impetus to keep posting regularly.

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One of the frustrating things with teaching art in my situation is what to do with it when it is done. There are two key situations that I find disconcerting. First, that the kids always want to give me their art when they are done. In a sense it is flattering. I have a sense that I’ve show a student how to do something neat, and they want to share the fruits of that experience and knowledge with the person that brought them to it.

In a way, I’m happy to have it. One of the difficulties in my first year of teaching was that, for my most successful lessons, I had the exemplars that I created to show how to do it, but no student samples. With so little storage space, and no sense early on as to how to organize and store the work, I didn’t think until nearly the end of the year to simply take pictures of the products in class. The only product that I created were ones that I’d use to create the single art bulletin board, in a back hallway in the school. And part of my job was to try and get the kids to value their work, and take it home.

But that’s the essential problem. Kids in the class, it seems, are used to looking at finished, polished pieces of art, completed on a computer, airbrushed intricately and with nary a ragged edge. As such, when they created amazing pieces of spontaneous art (that type of work which is possible with an abundance of talent and inspiration and the constraint of little time that is the hallmark of younger minds), they thought it messy, ugly, imperfect and unworthy. The kids have a hard time seeing something that they have created as having an inherent value, of being something of and with quality.

So I’ve taken to collecting their art.

It’s a bit of a problem, as I am operating off of a cart, and don’t have a space of my own in which to store it. From past experience, a spectacular piece of kids art has a shelf life of only about two years, before my shedding of a pack-rat mentality forces me to clean house. Unless the art serves as an excellent exemplar of a great lesson, and I actually file it with the lesson plan for that lesson, sooner ir later it’s going to hit the same recycling bin it was destined for, months or years earlier. And that makes me sad.

So I am redoubling my efforts to get the kids to take their art home. A piece of art brought home is good for the kids, in their ability to grow an appreciation for their own abilities through exposure. It helps them see that they can do something cool, and maybe inspire them to something new, next time. But more that that, a piece of art brought home also exposes parents to that art. While an average disinterested parent might be baffled by algebra homework, or disinterested in seeing the answers to written reading comprehension lesson, they can instantly take in and become engaged by a piece of art. A parent might feel intimidated by content that they never learned themselves. But, in my experience, no one is intimidated by kids art. And, as with all visual art, no one is without an opinion of it, nor shy about expressing it.

So it is in my enlightened self-interest in two ways, to assure that the art goes home with the kids. But how to do it is the key problem. And one I’ve not yet begun to address satisfactorily.