What is appropriate?

I'm trying to be a team player. I'm trying to take things from my training that will make me a better teacher. I've gotten a few things that I think will be helpful. It will help me refine what I already do. I look at all the objectives and see that I teach at a high level already (with the kids kicking and screaming all the way because they don't WANT to work).

We're supposed to teach lessons from the PBS Series Art 21. Our district has spent some money to get us copies of the series. I was "gifted" with the first three seasons yesterday.

I understand the value of contemporary art. I understand that we should teach our students things that are relevant to their experiences. However, our kids understand graffiti and billboards. Shouldn't we try to extend their experiences to let them know about the rich tradition of Art in our culture? Shouldn't we let them know that about the Ninja Turtles? Shouldn't they know about Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael?

I was a good drone today. I plugged in the first season of Art 21 and started watching. I watch. The first segment is on sculptor Richard Serra and it's very dry (which is sad because I love his work) and there is a lot of time that had no talking that shows people walking around in a museum and our kids will be drooling on the desk if we make them watch that. The next segment is on photographer Sally Mann. Her stuff is gorgeous. However, she shows a number of photographs of her children in the nude. I can appreciate the art of her work, but I don't want to have to deal with my students going home and saying "Teacher showed me pictures of naked children."

I loved Mappelthorpe's photographs of children running through a sprinkler. They were artfully done. He got in trouble with the National Endowment for the Arts because of this. Some of his work is not appropriate to share with our students. Some is. I cannot get over the staged photographs of Sally Mann's own children. She's been considered to be a source of pedophilic materials. Is this what we need to be showing our high school children? The Art 21 video shows her young daughter tweaking her own nipple in the photograph. This does not possess the spontaneity that the sprinkler kids demonstrated.

I think Art21 is an interesting and provocative program. For adults. I don't think this program has any place that is appropriate for high school students. I would recommend it if the parents of minor children had screened all the material and approved it for their own children. I would have allowed my personal children to see the material on this site ONLY after I had previewed it myself and had prepared myself to answer questions that would certainly be generated by the images shown here.

I push the envelope in my art history class by showing Annie Liebovitz's photo of Lance Armstrong. There is nothing explicit in the photograph but he IS nude. He's one solid man made of muscle. It's a wonderful exploration of the human form.

I would not show Sally Mann's photographs of her children ever to our high school children. I do not want to have to deal with the issues of our children telling their parents that we showed them pictures of nude children.

I love art. I love it in all of its forms. I can appreciate the strange and bizarre.

I just have limitations. I teach minor children. I'm being asked to direct our minor children (13 year olds in some cases) to look at a site that shows things that I would not allow my own children to view.

Does anyone smell a lawsuit here? I don't want to be on the news because I'm being mandated to display things that I find objectionable.

I'm in between a rock and a hard place. The district, as represented, is shoving this curriculum down my throat. It doesn't seem to matter that the presenter seems confused.

I can't go there. I know that we need to make our students think. I'm all for thinking. Thinking is a good thing. I just don't think that we should be mandated to make them think about images of bondage and fetishism and nude children as a mandated part of our curriculum.

Is that wrong?

Letter to the Principal

I started off writing this letter to my principal a couple of times today during staff development. I didn't send anything yet, but I 'm going to work it out here.

Mr. W.

I appreciated seeing you this morning and I was very glad to see you. It made me happy that you said that you were happy to see me. I appreciate that you were dispatched to counsel with me and the other "bad" art teachers after the reported bad behavior of our group of teachers last Thursday. I am grateful to see your smiling face and even more grateful for your hug. You are wise and I understand that you had an equally painful staff development last week. I edify your character and strength and inspiration to me as you tell me that I can make it through this.

I'm grateful that when I said that our presenter was a strange that you said that you understood that she was unusual.

I'm concerned that our person in charge does not have pure motives. She's under qualified. She taught a few years in the district and was rendered "redundant" at her school and was not picked up by any of the schools that interviewed her. She talks a good talk and apparently knows all the good buzzwords that are important these days. She has been promoted to her level of incompetence. I think she is a sweet person. My chihuahua is sweet, but she doesn't understand that she shouldn't run out into the street. Our person cannot, however, teach. She cannot answer simple questions. She reads convoluted text that I don't think she understands, and says that we don't know the answers yet but that we've got to figure them out. How can she teach us anything if she can't answer a single question? I'm concerned that she is working on some kind of post graduate program and that she is setting up our whole district as her guinea pig. Is that ethical?

Let's rewrite all the curriculum for a subject for one of the largest urban districts in the US. That would be a good resume builder. That could feed the idiocracy that is in charge of educating students in this country. Let's elect this person as Secretary of Education because she knows how to doubletalk the idjits in charge.

I became physically ill during the session today. I tried really hard to be pleasant and I tried really hard to understand the idiocy that was presented to me. I didn't act out and I didn't say any bad words.

Here am I in receptive mode. . .

Here is the input. . .

"We have paradigms of postmodernism that we need to relate to our students' cultural awareness. We need to bring relativity to them so that they employ inquiry learning."

WTF?

Am I slow?

Okay, I'm supposed to present an "ill-structured problem." I'm really not sure what that means. I got the point where we are supposed to make the kids think. I get that. I've always gotten that. I believe in making the kids think. I thought that was our job. I just don't understand what an "ill-structured problem" is.

OH, we're supposed to take our kids to the liberry (seriously this was said so many times) and in the liberry we are supposed to have them hook up with images that could not always be appropriate. But they are part of the curriculum that we are supposed to have them look at.

I'm just so appalled at the further dumbing down of America. I'm going to have to check with my friend the liberrian to see if she has time to fit in 70 sections of art classes into her limited space. She's going to freak out when I tell her that we are supposed to spend 11/14 hours doing research rather than making art. On a good day the library can only serve the computer needs of half of one of our classes.

Teacher, I have some feelings. I'm insecure and it makes me want to cut myself. So I cut myself because that's my feelings. One of the images on our wall today was of a wrist cut with a razor blade.

It's sad when it is the teachers who want to cut themselves because they have to put up with this nonsense.