Evansdale Eagles
Week of April 24-29
Need to Know....
- Please make sure to sign off on your TKES summative conference.
- Please make sure you sign up for an end of the year conference.
Staff Shout Outs
- Thank you to Mr. Clayton for overseeing testing.
- Thank you to Ms. Joseph, Ms. Umukoro, and Ms. Bruce and for hosting Ms. Thomas's shower.
- Thank you to Ms. Luhrs and Ms. Petrucelli for all of their hard work getting ready for arts and music night.
Week of April 24-29
Monday, 4/24
- GAM ELA sections 2 and 3-grades 3 and 4
Tuesday, 4/25
- GAM ELA sections 2 and 3-grade 5
- CFC soccer-2:45
- Zumba-6:30 (free to all staff members)
- GAM makeups
- TKES summative conferences
- Kilometer Kids
- GAM math sections 1 and 2-grades 3 and 4
- Black History program celebration-1PM
- Zumba-6:30 (free for all staff members)
- GAM math sections 1 and 2-grade 5
- Chess tournament-cafeteria-1PM-4PM
- Kilometer Kids
- Spoken Language contest
- Zumba-9:30 (free for all staff members)
Creativity As the Core of a 21st-Century Curriculum
In this Kappan article, artist/author Danny Gregory applauds the arguments made for the importance of art and music in schools: they improve motor, spatial, and language skills; they enhance peer collaboration; they strengthen ties to the community; they keep at-risk students in school and improve their chances of ultimately graduating from college; and students who have four years of art score 91 points higher on the SAT than students who don’t.
Nevertheless, Gregory’s experience is that a lot of art instruction is unimpressive: “In the lower grades, kids just have fun drawing and painting. They don’t really need much encouragement or instruction. In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes. All too often, art class becomes a gut, an opportunity for adolescents to screw around. By high school, they have been divided into a handful who are ‘artsy’ and may go on to art school and the vast majority who have no interest in art at all. In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it
is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”
Because art education is not fundamentally respected by most educators and district leaders, says Gregory, when hard economic times arrive, as they did after the 2008 recession, art budgets are among the first to get the axe – especially in low-income communities. As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.
Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success. “Nowadays,” says Gregory, “we all need to be creative in ways that we never did, or could, before. Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful – these are the skills that matter in the 21st century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop it. A great artist is also a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.”
Gregory imagines a new arts curriculum in which creativity is a core theme, with all students learning a wide array of skills directly relevant to their futures:
* How to communicate a concept through a sketch;
* How to explore the world in a sketchbook;
* How to generate ideas and solve real problems;
* In theater, how to collaborate and powerfully present ideas and emotions;
* In music, how to develop creative habits and teamwork, hone skills, compose, and improvise
* How to come up with ideas, find inspiration, and borrow from the greats;
* How to work effectively with others to test and improve ideas;
* How to get ideas executed through a supply chain, presenting and marketing them;
* How to use digital tools and remove the artificial divide between arts and science;
* How to show that engineering and sculpture are related, how music and math mirror each other;
* How to use Photoshop to communicate concepts;
* How to shoot and cut videos, design presentations, and use social media intelligently;
* How to write clearly “because it is the key to survival.”
Gregory acknowledges that a lot of this is already happening in some schools; he urges all schools to make creativity the core of the arts curriculum. “Don’t make black and white films about leaves reflected in puddles,” he says. “Make a video to promote adoption at the local animal shelter… Fill 100 sticky notes with 100 doodles of ways to raise consciousness about the environment or income inequality or water conservation. Stop making pinch pots; instead, build a 3-D printer and turn out artificial hands for homeless amputees… We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it. That matters far more than football games and standardized test scores.”
“Let’s Get Rid of Art Education in Schools” by Danny Gregory in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2017 (Vol. 98, #7, p. 21-22), www.kappanmagazine.org