The Art of Teaching Part 3: Observation

Continuing the posts on teaching and art or the art in teaching or what have you I want to now focus on the second general topic I outlined back in the first post, Observation. Arguably this is the easiest for me to describe and transform into a curriculum based on its importance in the already established science curriculum.

The bigger problem is not with how it is taught but rather with what it has to compete with in the classroom. The problem with the current science curriculum is in the artificial selection of content material deemed important to master at arbitrary grade levels. My students get way too caught up with memorizing the properties and names of rock types to be able to focus in on the simple task of observing them.

My opinion on science is not a new one but it has become more empowered after being a science teacher. In my opinion the most important element of “science” is how to ask and begin to answer questions. The actual facts and figures are irrelevant unless you are studying the relevance specifically. By that I mean geology and the properties of rocks are extremely important when taking geology. But in middle school science (which right now prides itself on being a hybrid of all sciences) the most important aspects are those that help develop your ability to approach the more difficult concepts later on. Ultimately what I am trying to say is that middle school should be devoted to teaching you how to be a scientists. The facts about rocks and elements you will forget by high school, which ironically is completely okay because it is retaught in the curriculum anyway.

So therefore if the content is arbitrary let’s just get rid of it and continue to teach it in high school. This would free up middle school to focus on what are called the process skills necessary for approaching that higher level content. I would be really nice to teach the cell for the first time in high school with all it’s parts rather than introduce it in 6th grade but with the disclaimer that there are only 5 organelles you need to be responsible for knowing. I never really understood what kind of message that sends to our students.

So this brings me to what this course on observation would be. Observation would be the overall theme for the three years, but it wouldn’t be the only element. Making inferences, hypotheses, conclusions, and so on would also take a significant role in this class. In a way you could call it a class on the Scientific Method, but fundamentally it will be a class on observation. Keep in mind the original idea of my first post, much of what we teach specifically is arbitrarily taught at that time except for the skills needed to learn (arithmetic, learning to read and write, how to make observations, and similar elements of elementary school are not arbitrary in their timing). But at the end of the day the most important part of what makes our specifies capable of developing science is our ability to observe, and with that our ability to record and make inferences from those observations.

A class focused around observation would teach that process in all its glory and have at the periphery the content elements through which this process can be practiced and mastered. But unlike our state curriculum which holds as its measure of mastery an 8th grade CONTENT test, I would make the focus of science to be about the process and therefore you will master my middle school science class when you can demonstrate your ability to make observations, and through those observations record and analyze your data to ultimately make conclusions.

thoughts?

-huysmans

The Art of Teaching Part 2: Creativity

Creativity as a subject is as I mentioned last time not new, but perhaps has not been fulling understood or executed. The idea behind it is to create an art like class that does more than just basic visual arts, it allows for students to discover what exactly they are creative in. But the problem is it rarely focuses on creativity as much as it focuses on talent. In the examples I have observed students do better by finding the medium they excel in, not creatively, but rather as a measure of talent.

Rather what a class based in creativity should be is a measure of how to think on your own. Creativity is not limited to art alone, it is something that we uniquely bring to everything we do. There is creativity in even the most basic human actions of eating and moving. When we teach it, and we should teach it, we need to focus not on exercises of talent in any specific field or medium but rather on how to do something your own way. In a sense such a class would fly in the face of your traditional subject classes which take so much time teaching a very specific, formulaic approach. So yes this would be rather difficult to incorporate into any traditional system already in place.

But It is necessary all the same. Success in life doesn’t come from following the rules but from breaking or augmenting them. I’m not suggesting that this be a class to teach revolution or decent but rather that it focus on the simple idea of thinking for yourself and in your own way. Those two ideas, simple in presentation yet complex in execution, would form the foundation of a creativity class essential for cultivating independent thinkers.

Lastly such class would need be early in the educational plan, save time for teaching specific ideas for later. Once a student has mastered the concepts of creativity they are ready to engage in history and science on a whole new level.

Thoughts?

-huysmans

The Art of Teaching, Part 1

For the next couple of weeks and perhaps a lot longer I will engage this blog in a series of discussions on the topic of teaching. More specifically on the relationship between art and teaching. This relationship, though unyieldingly general, is extremely important when its specifics are identified. I am/was (depending on the NYC budget and its cuts) a middle school science teacher at an inner city school. In addition to my science classes I also taught an art history/ appreciation class. Therefore when I talk about art and teaching I mean much more than teaching art or using art to teach content. Ultimately there is no end to where and how art relates to teaching and perhaps that is why an art critic like myself ended up as a teacher… of science.

Therefore in the next few weeks expect these posts to take no general form and to be full of errors and contradictions. I DO NOT WANT TO EDIT THESE. I want the ideas to flow, the mistakes to be apparent, and the evolution of thought as I and whomever else wants to participate engage in understanding what exactly the role of art is in education.

Let me start with this:
Were I to rethink and redesign education from the bare bones I would do away with the assumed four core classes of ELA (English Language Arts), Math, Social Studies, and Science and introduce an alternative four core classes as follows:

Creativity

Observation

Analytical Thought

Communication

When one makes it all the way to high school these would clearly not be the subjects, and in fact by high school a subject by any of these names should not exist as an option. What I mean by introducing these four subjects (most of which are not unfamiliar to education) are to suggest that these four ideas should be the focus of lower school education. These are four ideas, four concepts, four activities of our brain that are at the route of everything we do and everything that makes us uniquely human.

Thoughts?

-huysmans

The future of Cover Art

I want to start simply by saying I’m not sure where I stand on this or if there really is something to stand on. But for the past few years my friends and I have been wondering about the future of cover art in the music industry. Ever since the first album was “officially” released through programs like iTunes the question of the necessity of such a design came about. However if time is any indicator, it hasn’t phased it one bit.

But now comes the more interesting question. With the recent announcement from Amazon that the Kindle is outselling its hardcover equivalents, are the days of cover designs numbered? Not so unrelated is the example set by Project Gutenberg. The digitization of countless classic novels now considered to be in the public domain has rendered them coverless. Should you choose to download (for free… legally) a classic such as say… Washington Square by Henry James, you will find (at least in the case of the iBooks App for iProducts) there is no cover design. This is simply because it has been digitized as part of this project and is not being published by a publishing house, thus has no commissioned cover art.

Perhaps discussing classics is almost meaningless because despite how they are digitized, the hardcover equivalents continue to display cover art. But what happens when there are no more hardcovers? Will that happen?

Or put it more simply, why aren’t we digitizing the original cover art for these texts in the public domain? Perhaps that art is lost, or perhaps it predates cover art (my own understanding of the medium is limited, especially its historical evolution).

Ultimately it comes down to this: Will the art of cover design have a home in the digital evolution of music and literature? We already know that it can exist, but just because something can be there doesn’t necessarily mean it will be there. In the tangible form it was convenient because the cover was necessary. But in the digital world there is no cover.

So I leave the blogosphere with this question: What do you think is the fate of cover art?

-huysmans

Gaga or Duchamp or Selavy

For the past year I have been annoying my friends with the idea that Lady Gaga is the Marcel Duchamp of our times. Perhaps it is best to state that I don’t believe her to be an artist of the same caliber but rather I find her celebrity art lifestyle reminiscent of Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Selavy.

Rrose Selavy Portrait by Man Ray

Regardless I was pleasantly surprised this morning by a link my sister shared with me to Vogue’s website.

Gaga’s Art Piece.

I’m glad to see Lady Gaga recognizes the connection too. And honors it appropriately.

-huysmans

Washington Square

As of five minutes ago I have finished Washington Square by Henry James. Before taking this novel on I have read Turn of the Screw and The Beldonald Holbien by him. My impressions of the former were that of a story with an almost unlimited number of interpretations while those of the latter were that of a story whose existence solidified the destructive relationship between art, beauty, and life.

This novel however cannot be explained through either description. It exists rather for a different purpose. As I mentioned initially I have only just finished it and still need time to process what exactly happened. The central plot points are easy enough to outline and the general motivations of each character are clearly explained but the role of the narrator and his purpose is hazy to me to say the least. It is clear that there is a narrator, whom frequently refers to himself and his decisions in structuring his telling of the story (I presume it is a he as Henry James is a he). But ultimately our narrator defines a few plot arches in telling the story that in retrospect focuses solely around the life of our leading protagonist, Catherine Sloper. She is of no considerable talent or beauty and has little to be proud of save her inheritance, and yet she is capable of annoying nearly the entirety of the cast of characters surrounding her.

A conclusion that can be made from such a story is that those who do not prescribe to the expectations of society are ultimately silenced by them. Perhaps silenced not by death but by solitude. Catherine was manipulated so much by the people around her that in the freedom of her later years she cannot articulate, even to herself what it is that she wants. She refuses to take Morris back perhaps because she never forgave him, perhaps because even in death she is obedient to her father, or perhaps because she feels that despite all she has done in her life she doesn’t deserve an ending other than what she has chosen, solitude.

On the other hand our narrator doesn’t seem to have a particularly insightful understanding of Morris. Did he leave her for the reasons outlined? For her benefit? Or perhaps he left her because his own greed was not going to be quenched by the prospects of marrying her. I can’t perceive him as completely innocent in this, there seems to be malicious intent under the surface.

Ultimately what I like about James is this vague notion of finality we are given not to mention the lack of character motivations provided. But regardless one cannot forget the title, Washington Square, the location that defines the expectations of its residence and the desires to become residence. An idea of New York that is sadly not so buried in history.

This is one thought, I’d love others…

-huysmans

The Return

This post exists simply to say that we exist. Though this may be an obvious observation it is nevertheless true and deserving of some public awareness. We exist and we are publishing and we are back. In terms of categorical information, such as what will we be covering on the turn of the CBF we have few answers. Philosophy has engulfed the shores by which the Right Hand of Nixon lives where as I am caught up in the battle of the achievement gap or as it is known by most of the world, teaching. Through both these “categories” we do plan to continue our focus on art, or not-art, depending on how one wants to look at such things.

Thus we say welcome back and join us as we take on the world in a battle for total domination.

Be ready.

-huysmans.

Perdurance, death, and leaving something behind

It’s a few years old, but I just stumbled across this post (from Philosophy, et cetera) about J. David Velleman’s paper “So It Goes” (the link to the paper in the post is broken, but here is a PDF), which attempts to explain the Buddhist idea that the idea of an enduring self is an illusion that causes suffering in terms of Western thought, and in particular, in the framework of the neo-Lockean philosophy of Derek Parfit.  I will leave it to the links to explain the distinction between endurance and perdurance, but I had some thoughts on how this all relates to death.

To start, I would point out that the demarcation of an object in space is really a matter of arbitrary definition.  I’m unsure if this is the case for a consciousness, since I’m inclined to believe that consciousness is something that happens and not something that exists in space, but it certainly is arbitrary which atoms we choose to consider as part of our body – the air in our lungs, for instance?  But if we see consciousness as a particular type of process of perdurance that happens to our physical being, extending it in time like a crystal growing in one direction, we could just as well expand what we consider to be our physical selves to include, for instance, the things that we create, or others’ impressions of us.  In this case, we do indeed still perdure, often in an expanding way, after death.  If what we want is to extend ourselves as far forward in time as possible, then this means that leaving something behind that is in some way a part of us that will continue to exist is enough.  Of course, it’s also arbitrary what exactly we value in terms of perdurance – and I do think that the particular type of purdurance that is consciousness has a value in itself.  But, all that aside, I don’t think that death can be characterized as a ceasing to exist altogether unless one identifies “I” as the process of consciousness.  I am honestly not sure whether the “I” should be the process itself, but either way, all we can say after death about the thing that consciousness was happening to is that it has ceased to expand itself in the way that it had been expanding itself before – not that it has ceased to exist.  And depending on how we define it, it may continue to expand itself in other ways.

I’m hesitant to now conclude that we should view a work of art that remains “alive” after its creator’s death as a way around the implications of that death.  An absolute end will come eventually, regardless of what pieces of oneself one leaves behind, so if what we want is still to be never-ending, simply telling ourselves that we will “live on” in some way in the world does not solve our problem.  However, the idea that death is simply the end of a process of growth of, if you would, the main stalk of one’s being, rather than the sort of absolute oblivion that the heat death of the universe will guarantee, could at least provide a bit of comfort about the particular moment at which our consciousness ends, which taking care not to value the eternal over the ephemeral doesn’t help much with . . .

~therighthandofnixon

Visualizing Ideas: New York City in Pastiche

PSFK introduced me to something rather interesting. The project itself can be found at Christian Marc Schmidt’s website. It is described as a collective composition of New York City which visually combines the geographic neighborhoods of New York with the digitally communicated ideas floating around in the blogosphere. This piece culminates with the virtual/verbal representation of New York organized by its many neighborhoods.

Pastiche—A Collective Composition of New York City, by Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt from Christian Marc Schmidt on Vimeo.

My first thought when stumbling on this piece was a flash back to good old Jay Gould and his Oral History of the World. But the difference here is this piece is fundamentally written by the world and does actually exist. It most certainly is art of the communal and experiential kind, harking back to the days of the Dadas who, through those questionable Cadavre Exquise, formed works of art not centered on the talents of any one person but existing through the collaboration of the group. That is the heart of this project and though it has its creators: Ivan Safrin and Christian Marc Schmidt, it can only exist through the contributions of the blogosphere.
thoughts and reactions…

-huysmans

The Art of Talent: Evgeny Kissin

In the world of artistic discussions performance has been considered an experiential artistic work because with every performance of a piece the piece changes and takes on new character. I have always loved that about staged art, no matter how many times you see it, each time is unique. So the questions of artistic value for a performance become divided based on whether you are trying to analyze the creation of the original idea or that of the current interpretation. The problem with revisiting the classical works is that the original idea is not necessarily preserved to the creator’s specifications, then again Barthes that might not be a problem.Thinking a little bit about the intensely complicated issues that were only briefly described above I have had the enjoyment of listening to Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall. He is no composer and therefore is not a creator of musical compositions and yet has been credited as one of the most talented artist playing piano today. This is an interesting form of art if you really look at it, yes it is easy to define him as an artist but the way he is “creating” art is not necessarily in the tangible world. The pieces he performed are credited to others, to the composers who first wrote them. It can be compared to how a copy artist might practice his trade by painting the work of a great master. However that comparison fails to recognize the performance aspects of staged art. Though the copy artist will add his own take to the painting, the ultimate goal is to make it look like the original. A better example would be that of Picasso who recreated Velázquez’s Las Meninas in his own style. Kissin isn’t appreciated because he sounds like everyone thinks the piece should but rather because of his phenomenal talent to do what ever he wants with the piano. His hands can be anywhere, his timing is flawless and his style is unique.

He is an athlete of the art world and just as the art of athletic performance can be valued in its own way; his ability has the artistic potential in his movement, in his sound, and in his style.

So is this a different way to look at the arts? Can we judge an artist for his talent in the field? Can this form of art be considered a revival of the talent driven art of the salons? And what about the Dadaist who will consider this nothing more than a copy? Beyond any question or answer that can be conceived the reality in my opinion is that the creativity needed here is more hidden and harder to define than with an artist in the traditional sense, and yes in this sense I am including the Dadas in the category of traditional since they were creating. It’s a creativity that is in the way a piece is interpreted, in essence perhaps the best comparison is to a translator. In literature a translator is creating her own interpretation of the work of art and is therefore cultivating a new art work in the simple fact that the words change. Since it is not a one to one relationship between two languages, it is far from that as Saussure defined for us in the beginning of the 20^th century. And in finding the best way to make that interpretation, a new work of art is born, and the translator becomes an artist. The same is happening here. In Kissin’s interpretation of how the notes on paper and the markings associated with them should be converted into sounds we hear. That conversion is creation and Kissin, the artist.

Thoughts…

-huysmans