I am currently reading this book called “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson. This book is about the trials and struggles that a teenage girl faces in a “typical” school in United States. The book mentions her Art Teachers Welcome Speech on the first day of her art class.
I was bowled over and I thought of sharing this with you all. Below is the speech, partially modified in terms of sentence structure in order to maintain continuity and flow.
“Welcome to the only class that will teach you how to survive. Welcome to Art.”
“Soul – this is where you can find your soul, if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you have never dared to look at before. Do not come here to ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.”
“You will graduate knowing how to read and write because you will spend a million hours learning how to read and write. Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words and numbers more important than images? Who decided this? Does Algebra move you? Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don’t learn art now, you will never learn how to breathe!!!”
“Here is an old broken globe that I used to let my daughters use as a football and kick around the studio when it was too wet to play outside. One day Jenny put her foot right through Texas and United States crumbled in to sea.
Voila! An idea! This broken ball could be used to express powerful visions – you could paint a picture of it with people feeling from the hole – the opportunities are endless…”
“ You will each pick a piece of paper out of the globe.” On the paper, you will find one word – the name of an object. I hope you will like it. You will spend the rest of the year learning how to turn that object into a piece of art. You will sculpt it. You will sketch it, carve it or use the computer lab for computer aided designs. But there is a catch – by the end of the year, you must figure out how to make your object say something, express an emotion; speak to every person who looks at it.”
“Welcome to the Journey!”
I have been dreaming and hoping all my life to see Boards and Schools that allow teachers to work with this kind of latitude. I know there are some that come close to allowing this kind of creative expression – but like I said, there are only some.
The above speech related mostly to art, but I am sure such kind of work can be for social studies, environmental science, and science, including the most agonizing of all subjects – Mathematics.
Here is to wishful thinking.
Copyright© Nitesh Kotecha
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