6/26 tuesday morning page

Artist Keith Haring began his career as a graffiti artist….who many people didn’t think would amount to much….Have I given any thought to looking at any research models in the other arts to help develop your own research question?

Wow. This is an insightful prompt, which comes as no surprise to me, considering the author. Well, I think Albert Einstein flunked out of high school, and I know Bill Gates dropped out of college. I really, really like the idea of people who other people doubt really hitting something out of the park, whether it’s CSAP, a test, a presentation, a football game, or whatever. I try to give my kids examples of this kind of stuff as often as I can and some of the posters in my classroom are about failure (Michael Jordan has a really good one) and what can come of it. I think kids just don’t get taught “life” much and therefore are so busy figuring that out that they forget to see themselves in it; therefore, I feel they don’t understand their own potential. Or at least some kids that I tend to fixate on early in the year. I think my own personal experiences have made me ultra-observant to kids in that predicament. They are overburdened too early and I sometimes take time in class to teach them that it doesn’t really have to be that way, that it’s not that way for everyone and that if they could see into other kids’ homes, they’d see more comfortable, functional dynamics.

So I love the idea of using models in other arts to develop my research question. I just don’t know of many and wonder if I’m versed well enough in other arts to do them justice? But I like it. I like the idea of it. I use a lot of art in my class, as do many of us, I would imagine. Sometimes we make the art, but in terms of poetry especially, we try to explicate a piece of art as we would a poem (Can one really explicate a piece of art? What is the verb for what one does to a work of art? Explain? Tell the story of it?). It certainly feels natural to include art in a literacy class. I often think of my class as more of a humanities class, which I also try my best to explain to my kids. We talk about ethical and political issues often as a result of looking at Picasso’s “Gernica” or reading one of many of Ginsberg or
Whitman’s poems. It’s interesting. The kids have a lot of ideas and are often willing to support them, once they can take a temporary leave of all the other garbage they’re worried about and just put it out there and see what happens. They know full well they’re safe to do so in my class and that saying or doing anything to just please me makes me want to vomit or throw a temper tantrum, so that is never an issue.

Should I try to incorporate more artistic research in my own? Or musical research? Would that be broadening my scope too far or would it be a nice companion topic to what I’m already doing? Thanks for the idea! I would imagine that I’d come across different disciplines along the way anyway, but now I am more open to including it!