One of the first placement or personality type tests I took as a kid I kind of cheated on. I tried to gear my answers towards the creative and ended up being typecast as a tractor driver. In first grade I got the only D I ever got in my life—in art! As a solid A student through high school, no one ever suggested I go on to college.
Not sure what the problem was, but I think that education has changed to be more aware of who a student is and how they are doing. Some will inevitably slip through the cracks, but I think there is more teacher effort towards noticing and encouraging special skills or lack thereof within their students. Of course part of the situation back in my day was classrooms of sixty students as an average.
And then there is also the student personality like me who doesn’t like to follow direction completely, and it’s a wonder I did as well scholastically as I have. In a previous post on Joellyn Rock’s narrative pottery, I am reminded of my own run-in with pottery courses (a friend and I called them “clay class”). I did make one six-inch high vase on the wheel, terrified to bring it higher up when I saw the effort others had put into theirs just to end up rolling around like stretching a pizza when they carried it too high. My vase had a wall thickness of three quarters of an inch. My other projects in this course were totally undirected and dismissed by the instructor: A sitting nude sculpture (that I never fired because of the warning that it would probably blow up from the air bubbles within) and a flat disc on which I drew and painted the ingredients of my recipe for stuffed shrimp.
I still have that one—my first piece of narrative pottery.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Wow! What kind of teacher would give a first grader a D in art??! It’s true that we are taught, in teacher ed. classes, to appreciate different learning styles and talents. It’s one of the recurring themes in all of the education courses we take. I hope it means that fewer students slip through the cracks.
I weep for my colleagues who use so little imagination when working with vulnerable children whose creativity can so easily be squashed.
Rock on in to the Soul Food Cafe at http://www.dailywriting.net and do some spinning. I am sure we could work together and dispell all those critics.
in empathy
Heather Blakey
Yeah, it was devastating at the time–my mother (who did beautiful pencil drawings of the old time movie stars) said I came home and cried and cried. I still remember the teacher’s name–it was Sister Cyrene and she didn’t even speak English very well, and evidently she didn’t like the way my babcia (grandmother) taught me to color in little circles to stay within the lines. But by fourth grade my crayon series on The Stations of the Cross were hung around the room at Easter.
I think we may be giving Sister Cyrene too much credit here. I got my only D in sixth grade and I am convinced beyond doubt that it had nothing to do with me (well, may be just a little bit). My teacher was looking for a scapegoat to make herself look stern and I looked like someone who would keep quiet and take it than parade his parents to school the next day. I know the feeling.