Music and Art

"But, to be honest, you're only teaching an elective.  The kids are supposed to have fun in your class.  I mean, it's not like you're teaching something serious like math or history."

Recently, I've been hearing this sentiment a lot about my classes.  Being said to someone who not only takes her job seriously, but also both of the subjects she's teaching seriously (considered pursuing a career in both of those fields at one point in her life), it doesn't really sit well.  I refuse to be a glorified baby-sitter that these kids have for 45 minutes a day where they get to sit around and not learn anything.  My job is not to waste time before they have to go to their other classes... Unless I read my contract wrong...

And that's not to say that I don't want my students to have fun in my class.  Of course I do.  All teachers want their kids to have fun because when they're having fun they learn.  And when you're having fun with them, you are a better teacher.  I just don't think it's my responsibility to have the kids cut out shapes of paper and glue it on other paper, not learn any skills or new information whatsoever, while being rowdy and disrespectful to me, my class, and the school without any punishment for bad behavior because, Hey!  I'm supposed to be the chill art teacher that doesn't give a fuck?

No.

The average American, or at least the ones I've talked to for the most part, know the basics of music and art.  They know who the famous composers and artists are, more or less, basic music theory (like what a quarter note and a rest are), and what primary vs. secondary colors are.  These are some of the subjects I've covered in my class so far, and the majority of the students didn't know any of it.  But that's the thing: we take advantage of our education of music and art in the United States daily, and so we don't think it's difficult or meaningful or important material.

The idea that right-brain knowledge is not as important as left-brain knowledge is a learned mindset.  The history of Western civilizations' values holds logic as the be-all and end-all of intelligence, and mainly this logic that humans have is what sets them apart from the animals.  People who are more right brain oriented were considered inferior to those who were left brain oriented, and that belief has persisted to this day for many Westerners.  Basically, this thought process devalues a full half of what makes humans human as important, and in effect ostracizes entire units and subcultures of populations.

Personally, I'm an egalitarian, and I believe every part should have have equal import to the whole; learning what to think and learning how to think and how to feel and how to emote and how to rationalize are all important.

The idea that teaching art or music is a joke is absurd because it requires valuing one subject over another.  To think about this logically, then: math is another language, like Spanish or music, and helps you communicate something to another person, like any language or music, it's universal, like emotions and music, and it stretches your mind in a different way than other subject... like music.  Actually, music more than any other subject in school, it's been shown that students that participant in this one subject are more likely to do well in the rest of their subjects.  Music is a language, an arithmetic, an expressive, creative field, and more, yet math and Spanish and philosophy are more highly valued.

But, we do value travel.  People who have seen many parts of the world have a lot of cultural capital, and why?  Because they've experienced other cultures, saw art, heard music, tasted food, talked to friendly people they don't know; not because they did math with a guy in India.  Well, unless it was a meaningful experience or interesting story, then that would be cool... but then the math part would have very little to the message of the story.

Why would public education have dedicated so much time and money into teaching elementary students these subjects at least once a week for 7 years of their lives if it isn't important?  Why would public schools even continue to allocate money toward funding any music or art programs at all if it's such a joke, bullshit, fuck off subject like so many people are bound to believe?

Let's do an activity: in your mind, make a list of all of the geniuses in the world, throughout history.  Add to that list people who are the main holders of cultural and social capital, through time.  How many of those people are either artists or musicians?  And how many of those people are considered both geniuses and holders of cultural capital?  I'm willing to bet that it's somewhere between 70-90% of the list.

Someone would have to have an incredibly good excuse for why people like Mozart, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Picasso, Dali, and DaVinci, to name a few, were not geniuses.  I would also like to hear someone's explanation for why modern music and art, like music from the 1960s and hip hop and street art, are not legitimate forms of social expression and how that is not a legitimate thing to learn about.  We have old letters and writings and excavations, but the artistic remnants of a culture can tell us something nothing else can.  Viewable art and audible art are expressions of the human experience, which any human should find valuable.

Interestingly enough, I've recently put into words what my thesis is for my classes this year:

"The students will learn about part of the human experience through the medium of music and art in the historical and cultural context in which it was created."

I will not stop being hard on my kids.  My job is to teach them something and I cannot teach them when they are not receptive to it, and they have to be both physically and mentally receptive of what I have to teach.  That, for children aged 12-14, means discipline and hard work.  It means being taught respect and empathy, and how to think more deeply about subjects they know, and being introduced to subjects they've never had to opportunity to be introduced to before.  It means that these kinds are hopefully going to expand both their skills and their knowledge, and hopefully they will be more fluid in how they think about the world.

Music has consistently been a very big and important part of my life, and I will share with them my knowledge and teach them that language.  I have had many friends and family members who have been artists or have taken art seriously as a passion, including myself with photography.  I will never consider these subjects to be just electives.  I am surprised and disappointed in anyone who does.