Teachers as artists

There's a quotation I've often heard attributed to Pablo Picasso.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal."

I fully believe that great teachers teachers are artists; skilled professionals and performers who are tortured and driven to put themselves--the very essence of who they are--into their craft each day. And, of course, to create beauty in doing it. As such, I borrow and steal from colleagues and friends, from those who inspire me, and from the teachers I had when I was young. I do this all the time. Every day. I once wrote a blog post about my own Mount Rushmore of teachers, but the reality is that I have stolen elements of curriculum, instruction, inspiration, vernacular, engagement, and management from every single teacher, professor, and mentor I've had.

One example slid to the forefront of my life this week.

When I was in third grade, my mother opened a school. This was a somewhat complicated endeavor because we lived in a one-room schoolhouse (built in 1840!) and had to make room for the 12 students (k-8) who inhabited the huge room (that housed the fireplace). We lived in the three bedrooms upstairs and the bathroom and kitchen became the property of the school.

There are innumerable stories about Magical Youth School (M.Y. School for short), but there isn't space in these thirty minutes to go into any of them. The connection I made to my three year experience there came from a recent writing assignment my students completed.

At MY School we had two school publications each week. The "Moose News" and "Yellow Schoolhouse News." The latter of these two periodicals contained any articles, creative writing, artwork students had created that week, while the former was always centered around a topic ("the earth," "dishes," to name a few...).

It was the topical connection that always drew me in. I loved reading about how students (and teachers and parents!) interpreted and experienced topics differently, and how my own vision and perspective linked in (or didn't) with those of others.

The resounding memory, though, was that writing for the "Moose News" each week gave me a voice and an opportunity to develop my own positionality as a writer, a storyteller, but also as a human being.

I returned to this idea of topical writing this week with my eighth graders. I read them some excerpts from The Sun, a literary magazine with a section entitled "Readers Write" that invites readers of the magazine to submit writing on a common theme.

I provided my students with seven different topics from which to choose and asked them to select a story from their own life. I had them draw maps of their neighborhoods and we considered where the most important stories had taken place. We discussed the idea of in media res and considered how closely to the end of the story we could begin. We "exploded the moment" by focusing our writing in on the finest details of the story.

Now, nothing I did was novel or particularly innovative. But it did something for my students. It granted them permission to use their creativity to think about how differently we all think and write and experience the world. It gave them permission to be authors their own understanding...something we need today more than ever as the reality of consuming someone else's narrative threatens our democracy each day.

Whether they were writing about fights, shoes, "the last word," or any of the other themes provided them, my students placed their own lens into the world squarely at the center of their lives for the 45 minutes they were in my classroom.

My hope for my students is that they don't stop with these topics, but rather that they develop a sense of their own experiences and their own wisdom and perspective as being vital to the future of the world. Yes, we can steal like artists, but we also shape the art we make out of our own ideas...something never before seen by anyone anywhere.

One of my students couldn't contain themselves as they wrote.

"Ohmygosh, I love this so much."

That's one of the amazing things about having my classroom be my canvas...there's no need to wait for critics to assign value to my product, because the process speaks for itself.