September 2011 Newsletter

New Schools

“Argh!” screams my 3 year old from her car-seat in the Citibank parking lot, as she rips the hair off her Tinkerbelle Barbie doll, pulls off its arms and legs, and sticks its head in her mouth. Her face turns red as she bites down on it and I swear I can see steam coming out of her ears as she tremors with rage and frustration. 

I take the doll head out of her mouth, buckle her car seat, hand her a piece of baloney and a sippy-cup of milk, and cover her with her favorite silky “baba” blanket. By the time I start the car, she is fine. No words were exchanged; we didn’t talk “about” it, but we both know she had a tantrum. She lost control for a moment.

As the adults in these situations, how we handle ourselves is so important. With my own children I can get triggered, and don’t always respond from my highest self the way I would like to. But in the classroom or studio, I make it a point to be aware that “I am the weather,” as stated so beautifully by Dr. Haim Ginott. “I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.” So I set the tone for a positive attitude for learning. I cannot lose control of my emotions, and if a student does so, I am the harness that reins him or her back in, containing the vastness of these emotions and guiding his or her ship back to shore.

At Aimee Art Productions, our mission is to build self-esteem and literacy through the arts. Though we are required to spend time dealing with scheduling, logistics, spaces, financials, and long-term projections, our main focus has always been and still remains to be…THE KIDS. Their learning, their process, their joy. The “business” has always been and will always be, in service to the greater good and the larger goal – self-esteem and literacy through the arts. As Artistic Director and Founder of Aimee Art Productions, it is my daily task to remind myself, sometimes several times a day, to see the big picture in any given situation. Often, that includes tapping into my emotional intelligence to ask myself, “How is this child/parent/principal/teacher really FEELING? What is this really about?” Once I can get to a feeling level with any situation, I usually can see my way to the resolution of any conflict or challenge.

So much of our emotional health depends on self-esteem. This is an area which is hard to measure, but which good educators intuitively address.  In most public school classrooms there is often very little time allotted for such endeavors, it seems. Yet when we measure the success of adults, it often is not their test scores which determined their success; many times it is their self-esteem and ability to cope with obstacles and conflicts.

A recent article in the New York Times by Paul Tough entitled, “The Secret to Success is Failure?” discusses a principal at the prestigious Riverdale County School in the steep hills of the uppercrest part of the Bronx, a competitive and top-dollar private school where most students graduate and head to Harvard, Yale, and other top colleges and universities. Principal Dominic Randolph says that only 33% of students from the cutting edge KIPP middle schools, a network of charter schools in the South Bronx co-founded by David Levin, some of whom scored the highest in the city, didn’t make it through to graduate from a 4-year college. This beats the national average of 8% of students from low-income families graduating from 4-year college but doesn’t meet the 75% goal that KIPP schools had set.

Levin and Randolph together determined, with the help of Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, that it is not academic achievement that predicts success in life. It is the building of character. Simple statements on their classroom walls such as “work hard,” “be nice,” and “there are no shortcuts” are the slogans by which such successful students learned to live and to achieve.

Through failures and repeated attempts at success through experimentation, conflict resolution, problem solving and adventures with real-life, hands-on projects, successful students learn citizenship, bravery, fairness, wisdom, integrity, humor, zest, love and appreciation of beauty.

Another recent study by NORC at the University of Chicago, in which I participated as a Teaching Artist, researched the field of Teaching Artistry and its impact on education today.  This three-year long study found that “Teaching artists (TAs)-artists who make teaching a part of their professional practice as artists-are critical to the future of arts education and to improving the quality of schools.”  The most comprehensive study of the work of Teaching Artists so far, its researchers found that, “TAs have been major providers of arts education in community settings for over a century. In the last three decades they have become important resources in primary and secondary schools as well, where they have mitigated a long-term decline in arts education. In the process they have made significant contributions to making schools better places for students to learn and grow.Prior studies have provided strong evidence that arts education has powerful positive effects on student achievement and outcomes. NORC’s new study offers hope to schools struggling to preserve arts education programs and to policy-makers searching for effective education strategies to improve schools.”  Furthermore, Nick Rabkin, principal investigator for the study, states that, “careful analysis of student data and evaluation of arts education programs has shown that learning in the arts is strongly correlated with improved student behavior, attendance, engagement in school, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, social development, and, yes, even test scores.  The positive effects are most significant for low-income students. Given the data, art education should not be a perpetual candidate for funding cuts, but a core element of education reform.”  (See our donation opportunity below for students at King Middle School who need your support!)

Our Teaching Artists at Aimee Art Productions, and there are many like us nationwide, offer a unique perspective on both our art forms and on education.  We are an under-utilized resource which is only beginning to be tapped.  We make schools and homes exciting places of learning and creativity, reversing a pattern in arts education which was only for the privileged and the talented, pointing them toward advanced private instruction. We are democratic, dedicated, and work in a wide range of settings with a variety of age groups and demographics.  Our instruction is cognitive, student-centered, and social.  Though it is rigorous and contains multiple threads which connect to academic areas (reading, math, science, social studies), our work also accesses students’ emotional intelligence and builds their character in ways which traditional education cannot always achieve.

Tenacity, responsibility, courage, friendship, teamwork, self-reliance…these are character traits which our students must draw upon, build, and find within themselves in order to create their works of art.

It is these character traits that are built through the kinds of team-building, esteem-building experiences in the arts that our small but mighty little company provide. We are providing life-changing, transformative experiences for our students, which build self-esteem and literacy for a lifetime, whether it is a toddler recovering from a tantrum at Studio A in ballet-tap class, or an 8th grader acting in a STOMP! Heritage Play at King Middle School, character counts. Won’t you join us on our next adventure?

Events to Look Forward to…  

Mr. Marlborough Summer School  

This summer quite a few of our teachers brought their expertise to Marlborough Summer School to explore with their students the art of dance, musical theater, rock bands, creative writing, visual art and so much more.  Here are some of the pictures from a great summer.