[Mpls] Re: Arts in the Mpls schools

[Karen Cooper]

Wow.  Quite a lot of people talking about the arts in schools.  May I 
add my 2c?

Liz, I agree with you, and not with Michael, that children in MPS are 
short-changed in Arts Education.  I volunteered at Andersen 
Elementary School in Phillips last year, and went there specifically 
to support a school whose students test poorly, whose students live 
in poverty, and whose students, many times, are immigrants for whom 
English is a new language and is not spoken at home.

"My" second graders got no art education at all, beyond the simplest 
coloring pages or infrequent chances to draw or do a cut-and-paste 
project.  Y'all clear on that?  NO art education.  They got music 
instruction, and I think that was once a week for an hour or so. 
They had a class play with the simplest of costumes and no lines to 
learn.  The play was performed in about 10 minutes, so that was their 
theater education for the year.

Several of the classrooms got to walk over to In The Heart Of The 
Beast to see puppet shows, one time or another.  This was funded by 
grants to the theater, not paid for by the school district.  Beyond 
that, there were no field trips to art museums.  The first graders, 
all three classes, got to go to the Minnesota Center for the Book 
Arts and do three projects there.  That was a big day.

Why the arts matter, Mark, is a different question.  Many of these 
children live in a narrow world where self-expression is unsafe, or 
is limited to violence and bad behaviour.  Poverty does that. 
Struggling every day, sometimes failing, to keep one's family 
together does that.

Here's a story about a boy from school and me.  A seven-year-old.  He 
was acting up in class, he hit his teacher, was fighting with the 
other kids, being disruptive and not learning.  Turns out, his 
parents are splitting up, and his anger was at his dad because he 
wanted his dad to come back home.  So I took this child down to the 
library, just him and me, and we did some art.  He drew, with only 
the merest story suggestions from me, a whole comic book, with a 
superhero to solve problems and a happy outcome.  It took us a while, 
but doing the project helped him in some way to release the 
unhappiness that was preventing him from learning.  By the end of our 
comic-book drawing days, he was settled into class and doing much 
better.

I can't claim that this art project alone resolved his anger.  The 
school and his teachers were all in there pulling for him, and giving 
him all the help they could.  But maybe he'll keep drawing, 'cause 
now he knows he can, and maybe he'll keep open that channel to 
express himself.  Because he needs it, and a lot of other children 
need it even more than he does.

Kind regards,

Karen Cooper
not at this moment actually in Tangletown