Just Another Damn Thing to be Strong About

Tag: teaching art

  • Chinese New Year in Pueblo

    When I was a kid, my dad would scout out new restaurants and present them to us like a gift.  The Golden Dragon was one of those places.  I will never forget sitting down at the table with the glass top and the Chinese zodiac mats, the red booths, and golden lamps and the art with the tigers and dragons and incomprehensible writing.  I found out I was born in the Year of the Cock, which my brother thought was hilarious and to this day I refuse to say that.  I say I was born in the Year of the Rooster.  Dad ordered us all kinds of dishes and that night my love of Chinese food and culture was born.  

    Years later, when I was trying to solidify a theme for my first grade art class, I was scrolling through Youtube and I saw a Chinese New Year clip.  It was full of dragons, color, and fireworks.  I decided to do a unit on dragons. I showed the clip and told the kids we’d make dragons to bring luck in the New Year.   I told them if they did an excellent job, I had red glitter for the final sparkle.  They were so excited and kept showing me their dragons and saying, “I’m going to get lucky.”  I’m not going to lie, I laughed every time someone said that.  A lot.  But the unit was so successful that it became a unit I did every year after Christmas.  

    Now that I’m not teaching art, I wondered if I’d still be able to sneak in a little Chinese New Year with my class.  It turns out that the story in the literature unit is about Chinese New Year and the theme is–What can we learn from other cultures?”  I showed my students the video clip and we made Chinese lanterns, then we read the story.  They were into it, which is quite a feat in itself.  The next day after summarizing the story, I showed them how to make a paper dragon.  These kids aren’t used to art and they don’t have the scissor and glue skills.  They STRUGGLED tracing their hands.  But they wanted to make the dragons, and dragons got made.  I started hanging everything up in the hall at the end of the day, and it felt festive.  Like maybe we are ready for our own little celebration.  

    When I was teaching art everyday, I often wondered if it had a purpose.  I’d teach the order of the rainbow, or the steps to glazing and wonder–how is this relevant?  It’s not going to get anyone a job, or stand out on a resume.  Why am I doing this?  But I find myself asking the same questions with math and reading.  Is reading a fairy tale ever important?  Why does anyone need to build an area model of a multiplication problem?  When did area models become a thing anyway?  How do I make it relevant when I don’t even know if I believe that it is?  

    Here is what I’ve learned–teaching art made more sense to me.  Creating a space for kids to take risks and try new things really was my jam.  It was about the process and TRYING and building a community where kids shared and helped each other and everybody had a masterpiece at the end of the day.  Or at least had fun trying.  Maybe I had to leave the art room to learn what it meant though.  I don’t hate having my own classroom.  Maybe if I’d done it earlier in my career, I would have loved it.  I certainly have never felt this way about a group of kids before.  They are like my own.  I care about them and want better for them.  It bothers me a lot that they have trauma and worries that grown adults couldn’t handle.  I think about them late into the night and wonder how I am ever going to get them ready for middle school and high school and all the hard stuff ahead.  It’s a lot.  

    You know what gets me in the door everyday?  I don’t want to be another adult in their lives that quits on them.  And I wonder maybe if I’m supposed to be there.  Like maybe I’m supposed to fight for them and say, these kids need art.  They need a way to feel successful and proud of their accomplishments.  Art encourages risk taking and builds resilience.  It brings new worlds and teaches problem solving and demands higher level thinking.  Maybe I’m crazy, but something brought me to Pueblo and as hard as it is, I am in the game, not giving up.  

    Today, I’m going to finish my mural in Florence and then I’m going to stop by Jade Cafe and get some fortune cookies for my class.  I think it will be fun to pull out the little slips of papers and try writing our own fortunes.  It might be torture, but just maybe something about all this will stick, because you just never know what experiences impact everything.  Happy New Year to all my students–past and present, and to all my family and friends.  May the New Year bring us all a little luck and a lot of love.  

  • Blogging

    woman looking at sea while sitting on beach
    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    I haven’t blogged much this month.  It’s not because I haven’t thought about it, but I’ve had so much going on that I’ve had a hard time narrowing down a topic.  At the beginning of the month, I thought I’d blog about being back at work.  Then I thought I might blog about apples or art.  Or about hot flashes again, because seriously, the heat outside and inside is making me absolutely CRAZY.  But the biggest reason, I haven’t blogged is that I reread something I wrote and it made me cry.  I don’t think I realized how sad I am.  I think, “it’s been three years since Mom and Dad died, why I’m crying.”  Still.  Probably because I didn’t let myself cry in the first place.  I completely suck at letting myself be sad.  And no one needs to hear about my tears.  But the thing about writing for me, is that it is a compulsion.  Eventually, the words spill out somehow or someway.

    So here I am in the middle of this night, back to blogging.  I have been reading The Tale of Despereaux for this little book club, a colleague and I do with students.  The book is a fairy tale of a sorts about a mouse.  The story is charming, but in general mice scare the hell out of me.  So when I fell asleep tonight, I almost immediately had a dream where I was covered in mice and jerked myself away.  I shook it off and tried to get back to sleep, but then fell into a dream about riding a rollercoaster in the river.  Everyone fell off and drowned.  Again, I woke myself up.  My son is awake, so I lay awake listening to the sounds from his room for awhile and decided that if I was not going back to sleep, maybe I would write a bit.

    I would love to say that Shayne is doing okay, but I’m not so sure.  He went back to work, but he’s been acting really weird.  He says he’s not hearing voices, but he is, I know.  He is constantly whispering and laughing to himself and lately, he is so distracted.  He barely can follow a conversation.  Sometimes he screams because he sees the soulsnatchers out of the corner of his eyes.  His screams can leave me terrified for hours. Yet, he isn’t saying paranoid things.  His eyes don’t have the tell tale glint of psychosis.  He seems to be taking his medicine.  I’d talk to his doctor, but she quit last week.  I guess a new provider will be showing up soon.  I could take him back to his old doctor, the one that just gives him drug after drug, or take our chances with the new person.  In the meantime, I am watching and listening to him.  It’s like waiting for a damn hurricane to hit.  Usually I try to get in front of the storm, but I’m not sure where it’s coming from this time.

    Darian is navigating a storm of her own.  She started her last year of high school with a heavy course load and anxiety and tears.  I told her to talk to her counselor and change her schedule.  I never would have told her brother to do that, or done that for myself, but really high school is a small microcosm of life and in the big scheme of things, high school transcripts are not that important.  So she dropped Honors English for creative writing–a much better fit. She had to adjust her schedule a little and is taking an art class for the first time since middle school.  Darian never wants to be compared to me, so she steered away from art, but she’s got the eye for it and she is actually loving AP art history and drawing.  The really ironic thing is that Darian’s art teacher was my art teacher in high school.  This woman changed my life and it looks like she’ll also help Darian finish strong.  I’m trying not to think too much about Darian finishing high school this year and letting her go, because she is going for sure.  As far away as she can.  I am just trying to enjoy each moment that I have.

    On a good note, I’m enjoying teaching more this year.  I realize that I haven’t been much of a teacher since mom and dad died.  That first year, holding everybody and everything together was so all encompassing, that school was way on the bottom of my list.  The second year, keeping Shayne alive and trying to figure out how to get some help for him was far more important to me than just about anything else.  And then last year, getting through cancer took all my focus.  I showed up to work and had a plan, and engaged kids, but my  personal engagement was completely turned off. This year, I’m working on being more present.   I’m really enjoying participating in the discussions about building a new school.  It’s so exciting watching the plans unfold.  I might get an art room with an outside terrace or balcony.  Although I’d be thrilled with storage and new sinks.  Currently, my closet floods whenever there is rain and I have mushrooms growing on the INSIDE of my door.  Apparently the sprinklers water the lawn AND the inside of my classroom.  And I’m really working hard on improving what I do with first grade. I always feel like teaching art to first grade is like teaching kittens to knit.  Sometimes they are more like tiger cubs.  I’ve changed up some of the projects and I’m trying to be better at embedding habits and routine.  I’m not saying I’m being successful.  Kids are still drinking the damn paint water and I’ve had kids finish something in two minutes that should take thirty minutes.  Today I was trying to get them to line up, one was crying, one was dancing in front of the mirror, three of them were still washing their hands, and one was under a table.  They all sounded like they were at a rock concert.  And that’s when my principal showed up at the door.  But overall, it feels better.  Like by Halloween, they might be tame.

    The other morning, I reached for my toothbrush which is in a little white plastic tray that I took from my mother’s bathroom  She used to keep the tray under her sink and it had nail scissors and her nail file in it.  I just put my stuff on top of her stuff, and it’s been by my bathroom sink since she died.  For whatever reason, that morning, seeing her pink nail file brought tears to my eyes.  I swiped the tears away, sort of irritated with myself for crying over a nail file.  It seems like I miss her more than ever.  I miss my dad more than ever.  I have to remind myself that it’s okay to cry.  It’s okay to be sad.

    So I guess dreaming about drowning on a rollercoaster it pretty indicative of where I am in my life.  I am  riding my bike, walking, skating some, and helping James with the harvesting when I can.  There’s a clay class starting next week to look forward to and another writing class coming up.  And of course I’m surrounded with great friends and family.  I know I avoid my tears and fake happy and try to pretend that everything is fine, but I guess when it comes down to it, I’m just doing the best I can.  I’m going to keep showing up and writing myself through this.