10 Things I Learned This Week

I just got back from the NC Arts Educators Conference, cutely labeled: North Carolina: The State of the Arts, a statewide conference addressing the arts in 21st century education.

Now I don't know about you guys, but I don't have any idea what that means! So, without further ado, the top 10 things I learned while hanging out with arts educators (in a particular order, but not one having to do with rank):

1. When they say "arts," they mean visual arts, dance, music, and theater arts. I had never thought about anyone but the cool kids (visual arts). Seriously. My eyes have been opened to the need for theater arts in our school. I feel that if the kids want dance, they can take spanish (our spanish teacher makes the kids dance each semester: this semester is the cha-cha). Where have our Cary Grants and Audrey Hepburns gone?

2. As of 2000, 68% of middle and elementary schools pull students out of their electives to participate in remediation. I imagine this number has risen in the past seven years. This is sad. It is no wonder that discipline problems rise every year when kids are removed from the classes that allow them to think creatively and placed into classes that make them do WORKSHEETS.

3. The state of California began training their middle and elementary school math teachers in techniques to integrate math and art. The students that received the benefits of this training saw their math scores double. These results align with other, smaller studies. Basically, integration WORKS!

4. I had to make a list of all of the teachers in my school that were integrating other subjects with theirs, and I realized that there are a lot of teachers in my school that are well on their way to integration. I think we just need to do it better. There is a big difference between integration and enhancement. I know I am guilty of simply teaching the math as a means to an end. It was put very simply to me this weekend: good integration involves the math getting better with art AND the art getting better with math.

5. Socrates was the originator of the dreaded "essential question." He was sentenced to death by hemlock (a lovely drink) for corrupting the youth of Athens.

6. Arts educators are predominately female. This means that, as a rule, they do not care about the Final Four and they do not understand why one would watch PTI. I quote "Those two aren't even cute." That, my dear ladies, is that Around the Horn is for. These ladies are also predominately older and do not want to join you on a morning run, but do want to lament how crazy you are.

7. Over 1/3 of the arts administrators will be leaving their positions for retirement or another career in the next 5 years. The problem is that there are no young people coming behind them to fill these positions.

8. The world education conference (it had a better name than that, but I have forgotten it and I did not write it down!) stated that they had three goals for educating their children: literacy, numeracy, and creativity. World leaders (not the US, so much) have come out repeatedly as saying that the most important trait their children need is creativity. With the globablization of the world, creativity is going to be needed to solve the new problems of an interdependent market.

9. Art is listed as a core subject in NCLB. Intriguingly, foreign language is not.

10. Title I money is only 7% of each school's budget.