The Start of the next Story

I do any art form I can get my hands on; my artistic curiosity is something that I both enjoy and take pride in. There are, of course, art forms that I am more closely connected to right now, oil painting, creative writing, knitting, song writing, and pottery to name a few, but give me anything and I'll try it.

This mentality is why I chose electives in poetry and storytelling rather than my more comfortable music and visual art for grad school this spring. And, so far, what a good choice! This past weekend I spent my Saturday and Sunday from 8 am to 5 pm in a rather ugly, sparse classroom. Oh, the horror, right?

Wrong.

The best thing about going to an art/education school is that the teachers know how to teach and they know their art form. Abigail Jefferson, the instructor for my weekend course, isn't only a wonderful and engaging teacher, she's an inspiring storyteller. With her we learned about storytelling through storytelling. Throughout the long weekend I don't think we sat down for more than an hour at a time. This comes from Abigail's experience with middle schoolers, but also speakers to her knowledge as a performer and teacher about attention spans and how to best engage people.

While preparing and excitedly waiting for this class, I found myself noticing the stories I was already telling everyday and remembering the stories that I had been told throughout my life. There are stories that I forgot that I knew and stories that I forget how I know, ones through which I hear my mother's voice and Jim Weiss's on cassette. Yes, even I am old enough to remember cassettes.

Through the class I also realized that stories are, and always have been, how I learn. I've been blessed by whatever combination of nature, nurture, or spiritual force you personally prefer with a sharp memory. I can hear things once and teach about the material later in the day. (That has happened. More than once. Bad planning, I know). But during the weekend I realized that stories and discovery aren't just good tools for teaching and learning, they are the best.

Give me facts, numbers, and names and I can read them over three times and know them for the test tomorrow. But then I promptly forget them because I just don't care about those specifics. There are people whose life work is based off of such specifics and facts, but I am thankfully not one of them. I could describe the entire catalogue of an artist's work, the stories behind each piece, and the artist's biography, but forget their name until something reminds me of it hours later.

But to tell stories you don't need verbatim, memorized facts. Indeed, memorization often impedes a good story. You need to absorb and understand the story itself. Then, when you go back to tell it, the details can be formed in the moment, based on the connection and the energy you are experiencing. Storytelling is a trust exercise between you and your brain, one that I need to practice. I often lose what I know because I over-think and second guess myself rather than trusting not what I've memorized, but what I've learned, what I know. In psychology, that's called psuedostupidity. (A random fact I remember from my second year of college not because it was the most important, but because I could directly connect it to my life... and it made me laugh.)

From my reading for another class, I can see that I'm far from the only person who believes in storytelling as an incredible vehicle for teaching. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Paulo Freire, the father of current educational thought and the archangel of Lesley schooling, describes how he teaches writing. Rather than reducing reading to rules of grammar and structure he taught these rules as "objects to be discovered within the body of the texts." He goes on to say that "the students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance." Freire was on the forefront of changing teachers from the fountain of information to the leaders of discussion and discovery, or the storytellers.

As soon as I read Freire's words, my brain clicked into gear. I wasn't thinking of something that I remembered from my days of rote memorization, but something that I knew from listening to Abigail, taking part in her stories, and making my own stories; that human connection is the best way to teach and to be taught.

Are they getting anything?

Like any good artist/thinker, every once in a while I have an existential crisis. Is there any point? Does looking at pretty pictures ever actually matter? Am I making any difference? Why should we do anything when in the end we all die and the earth gets blown up by the sun? That sort of thing.

In the past two years or so, and even more intensely in the past six months, I haven't found these questions repeating themselves in my head. At this point in time, my life direction is clearer than it has ever been. I love what I learn, what I do at work, the people in my life, where I live, pretty much everything. It's a little surreal to tell the truth, but that train of thought is for another time.

Despite the current absence of my existential crises, I am constantly shoring up arguments for my rational self to use when they reappear in my life once again. At work yesterday a perfect example presented itself to me. I had a good chunk of time in the afternoon between two classes I was teaching at the MFA and it turns out that my co-worker and friend was in the same predicament. She suggested that we go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum since it is literally right up the street and I'd never been there (or so I thought).

I eagerly accepted and we made our way through the strangely warm January day to our neighbor museum, wearing our IDs on our red MFA lanyards. As we entered the new wing of the Gardner, which architecturally looks very much like the new wing at the MFA, we were kindly greeted by museum workers with bright yellow Gardner lanyards and I had to wonder if our separate museum superiors hadn't planned the obvious contrast.

Walking through the new wing was lovely. Looking at art and places where art is displayed and talked about is always interesting, particularly when you have good company. But my new found weapon against future existential crises came when my friend and I walked through the glass tunnel connecting the new wing to the original Gardner museum. As I entered the stone and brick mansion, I had the strangest feeling of deja vu. I shook it off, knowing that sometimes that just happens, and followed my friend in the main hallway of the museum that circles around the famous courtyard.

Finally, a memory that had tickled my mind for years snapped into place as I stared at the small hallway on my right.

There are some memories which are so specific that I can see bits of them in my mind as clearly as if I am looking at a video or a photograph. The hallway I saw yesterday belonged to one such memory. For years it had floated around my mind and every once in a while I would try to place it. Could it be the New York cloisters which I went to on a 2nd grade field trip? Or some scene from a medieval movie? Maybe it was from one of the cathedrals I saw in Italy that for some reason felt like it had happened a long time along?

Actually, it was the first floor hallway on the right side of the courtyard in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Despite the fact that last time I saw it I was about a foot and a half lower, I recognized it instantly.

In fifth grade my class took an overnight field trip to Boston. We did all the usual historical and tourist routes, which is what I remember. However, apparently, we also went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the image of the cloister-like hallway in a building that had once been a woman's home engrained itself on my ten-year-old mind.

So how does this argue against my future existential crises?

Something that can be hard to tell as a teacher is whether you've really gotten through to your students or not. Of course there are the obvious responses, the glowing eyes, bright smiles, and exclamations of joy. But what about the kids who aren't as overt with their responses? Are they still getting anything?

I still don't have a definite answer. However, I can now say from personal experience, sometimes people are absorbing information even when they don't realize it. Ideas you were taught in your youth could be recalled from your memory banks at any point. And no, not everything will stick for every child. But there's still hope that at some point in their lives your students will have a moment of eye-opening memory that brings back some dormant lesson you taught them. Maybe they'll feel a deep connection to an art piece or a museum that you brought them to. Or maybe that's just me. Either way, existential crisis: averted.

New Year's Resolutions

It took me a while to decide on a New Year’s resolution this year. I had little plans, making sure I was doing things on time and keeping my life organized, but nothing more than I do all the time. Those mental reminders that you always tell yourself and hope that this time you’ll actually stay on point with them. But this past Saturday I finally decided on what I wanted to keep myself doing for the rest of 2012.

My resolution came to me after I realized that the show I wanted to see at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston was closing in three days. With the work schedule I had there was only one morning left open for me to see the art that had been open on a tab on my Google browser for the past two months. So, dragging myself out of bed unnecessarily early on a Saturday when I wasn’t working until the afternoon, I made my way through the chill of a January morning down to the ICA.

The exhibit I went to see, Dance/Draw, deserves its own post that I may or may not actually write. In my current line of thought, the important part was what it made me realize. Despite the fact that I work with art everyday, I surround myself with it in my school, my jobs, and even the type of people in my life, I found that I missed going to see art.

I’ve been living in Boston for over half a year now and until this past Saturday I hadn’t been to a single museum except the one where I work. Even there, I’ve only gone to actually look at the art for my own enjoyment and artistic development once or twice. There’s always next weekend, when I don’t have to work or go to class, or that friend who said they would go with me, just not today.

But there’s no excuse.

With the free entrance I get to the many museums in the Boston area, the easy T ride to all of them and the amount of holes I have in my schedule I can’t even pretend to have one. Art is my life. After three hours in the museum walking at a pace that a snail would laugh at so that I could read the writing on each of the pieces as well as absorb the visual effect, I was reminded just what that statement means. I walked out of that museum with my mind whirring so fast that it felt like I wasn’t actually thinking, I was just living the ideas of my art. Each breath I took, step I made, piece of trash I saw, was a possible inspiration for a piece of art, for my next creation.

And so we come to my New Year’s resolution. Once a month, without fail, I am going to dedicate a day to viewing art. Not to making it, not to thinking about it, researching it, or talking about it, but to actually standing in front of new art pieces. If all goes well, I’ll go to more than one a month. If all goes really well, every time I go I will be inspired to actually write on this blog. It’s a new year and art is as strong a part of my life as ever. I plan to keep it that way.