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stlukesguild
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That scene looks quite familiar. We always buy our grandkids art materials. We bought some nice toned paper and oil pastels for the twins who live in New Jersey. They started drawing immediately and let us take a few works home for the refrigerator gallery.
brianvds
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Enjoy while you can. Smaller children, almost universally, spontaneously take to art, and draw with confidence and abandon, beautifully, with a perfect sense of composition, filling up whole pages with color and form. Then, when they reach age ten or thereabouts, they freeze up, their abilities seemingly gone. It is my misfortune to give lessons to a bunch of primary school kids, grade 4 to 7, and almost none of them can draw half as well as an average six-year-old. I am at my wits' end. You have to go to great lengths to get them to make any mark on paper at all, their sense of composition is gone, they make these anemic little drawings, somewhere in a corner of the page, and constantly need help to get anything done.
Maybe if you ask them what they WANT to draw they may show some interest? Mistake: with a few exceptions, they all want to draw anime. Anime, anime, and nothing else. The few exceptions either don't know what they want to draw, or don't want to draw, period. Now, I have nothing against anime, and actually quite like the style myself, but alas, it isn't technically easy, so the kids soon end up very disappointed that there isn't some simple magic trick you can show them that will instantly turn them into expert mangaka. But they don't want to do simpler stuff either, because that's for little children.
It's difficult to compete with TikTok...
Hey, YOU'RE an art teacher with decades of experience: you tell us how to win and keep their interest.
stlukesguild
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A great many kids seem to lose interest in Art once they reach 5th or 6th grade… Middle School in the US. Part of this seems to be due to greater interests in sports and streaming games, videos, and music on their phones. Thinking back to my time as a students I’ll admit that the number of students who remained passionate about making art was limited. By Middle School most students develop a preference for a degree of “photographic” realism… and lose interest in making Art when they cannot achieve this. You are right that many kids are hooked on anime… or cartoon imagery such as Sponge Bob. But then again… during my years in Middle School (or Junior High) and High School A lot of what I drew were images drawn from comic books.
How to engage the students? I have them do a lot of projects rooted in pop culture: emojis, Angry Birds, pop musicians, Disney & comic book characters (a lot of the kids wear clothes with Elsa (Frozen), Ariel (The Little Mermaid), and other Disney Princesses, Batman, the Joker, Spider-Man, and the Hulk. You can always build lessons around these images that explore concepts such as primary/secondary or warm/cool colors, movement, space (overlapping/cropping), texture, etc…
How to engage the students? I have them do a lot of projects rooted in pop culture: emojis, Angry Birds, pop musicians, Disney & comic book characters (a lot of the kids wear clothes with Elsa (Frozen), Ariel (The Little Mermaid), and other Disney Princesses, Batman, the Joker, Spider-Man, and the Hulk. You can always build lessons around these images that explore concepts such as primary/secondary or warm/cool colors, movement, space (overlapping/cropping), texture, etc…
brianvds
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First, apologies, this post turned into a huge essay, but perhaps you'll find it interesting to see what happens in another school on a different continent!
Yes, this indeed seems common across cultures: by around age ten, kids suddenly want their drawings to "look right", and then give up in frustration when they cannot manage. I have seen this over and over: kids seemingly literally terrified to just make a mark on paper. It's partly an ego thing: they worry what their friends will think.
Seems there should be ways around it. In the days before cameras, pretty much all educated people learned to draw decently, because it was the only way to record things. One often sees this: you look at sketches drawn by non-artists, and think, jeez, the average Joe in 19th century England could draw better than many a professional, working artist today!
I don't know how 19th century drawing masters did it. Maybe they just beat the kids until they focused!
Teaching methods - and perhaps more importantly, goals - seem to have changed. I once saw a handwritten essay, written by Paul McCartney when he was ten. What struck me the most was how beautiful his handwriting was. Apparently, in his day, at least in British schools, there was nothing exceptional about it at all; that was the standard.
Nowadays, schools often seem not to care at all anymore what things look like: you see exercise books falling apart, no assignment has a date written at the top, headings not underlined, or roughly underlined without a ruler, completely illegible handwriting etc. I constantly see kids who do not know how to hold a pen when writing, and remember how, during my own early primary school days, teachers would patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) demonstrate it over and over, and correct kids that got it wrong.
Now I don't want to sound like your typical old geezer complaining how things were different in my days. But they really were different: aesthetics has left the building. Every year I run into kids in grade 4 and above, who quite literally cannot draw a straight line, or do simple measurements, with a ruler. But they all want to be mangaka.
I have tried some of this, and indeed, also used their favorite anime characters. There's nothing wrong with anime as such; those artists are hugely skilled, and the art is often beautiful (with producers like Studio Ghibli, the art can in fact be quite breathtaking). But same problem as with anything else: the kids' ambitions hugely outpace their ability, and they end up disappointed, drawing after drawing. I don't know if this doesn't end up actually putting them off art rather than motivating them.
But more fundamental skills they do not want to learn, because that's for little children (you will never convince them of the sad truth, namely that little children produce far better art than they do!). Another problem is something you may have noticed: there is often a sharp difference between the sexes. Girls tend to be far more cooperative, and do not mind trying to do 'beautiful' art, whereas with boys at that age, as Betty Edwards noted, "taste reaches an all-time low." It can be difficult to reconcile the half of the class that enjoys drawing flowers and pretty ponies with the half that wants to show werewolves ripping victims to shreds or some such.
Background: some years ago I visited local schools to ask whether I could put up an ad for art lessons at their school. A Montessori School ended up offering to pay me to come in once a week to teach everyone from grade 4 to 7. The advantage is that they are fairly open about what and how to teach. But there are some unique challenges.
For one thing, all the kids from grade 5 to 7 are in a single class. Also, here in South Africa lots of kids are severely developmentally challenged, and private schools are often used by rich but clueless parents as a convenient place to dump them. The result is that I often have, in the same class, kids whose mental and fine motor abilities range from grade 1 to grade 7, and I am expected to teach them all the same thing. Inevitably the more developed ones get bored, or the less developed ones get frustrated.
Some years ago the classes were still quite small, and I could pay more attention individually; those kids rapidly progressed remarkably well, and I could teach all manner of fun things. I based many lessons on the book You Can Draw in 30 Days, by Mark Kistler, in which he starts out with simple geometric forms and progresses from there to show how those can be used to construct all manner of things. The kids mostly loved it, because even a simple 3D cube that looks realistic was more than they could do at the time. So I had a few kids in class who had almost no talent or initial ability, but who became quite motivated and made good progress:
Since then the school has become more successful - but that also means larger classes with a broader range of ability (or, alas, inability), and more behavioral issues. Also, even in the few years since then, the worldwide disaster called social media has tightened its grip here as well. Maybe it's just my imagination, but in under a decade I seem to have noticed a marked decline in attention spans and willingness to do anything at all that isn't instantly entertaining.
I'm always in two minds as to whether I should indulge their pop culture tastes, or simply ram something more traditional down their throats. Anecdote: when I was their age, like most boys, I did not enjoy poetry lessons. But there was no way out: poetry was rammed down our throats. Little snippets of those poems still sit in my head, and I am grateful that they rammed them in there, because which kid would ever read poetry voluntarily, or develop even the most rudimentary appreciation of it without it being forced on them? (Admittedly, to this day I struggle to understand or appreciate poetry, but without those lessons, I would hardly have known that such an art form even existed).
Kids don't know what they want or what is in their own interest, so one needs to find some balance between forcing them to learn stuff, but also trying to make it at least somewhat enjoyable. Well, you would know how it is: the challenge can be both fun and very frustrating.
Yes, this indeed seems common across cultures: by around age ten, kids suddenly want their drawings to "look right", and then give up in frustration when they cannot manage. I have seen this over and over: kids seemingly literally terrified to just make a mark on paper. It's partly an ego thing: they worry what their friends will think.
Seems there should be ways around it. In the days before cameras, pretty much all educated people learned to draw decently, because it was the only way to record things. One often sees this: you look at sketches drawn by non-artists, and think, jeez, the average Joe in 19th century England could draw better than many a professional, working artist today!
I don't know how 19th century drawing masters did it. Maybe they just beat the kids until they focused!
Teaching methods - and perhaps more importantly, goals - seem to have changed. I once saw a handwritten essay, written by Paul McCartney when he was ten. What struck me the most was how beautiful his handwriting was. Apparently, in his day, at least in British schools, there was nothing exceptional about it at all; that was the standard.
Nowadays, schools often seem not to care at all anymore what things look like: you see exercise books falling apart, no assignment has a date written at the top, headings not underlined, or roughly underlined without a ruler, completely illegible handwriting etc. I constantly see kids who do not know how to hold a pen when writing, and remember how, during my own early primary school days, teachers would patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) demonstrate it over and over, and correct kids that got it wrong.
Now I don't want to sound like your typical old geezer complaining how things were different in my days. But they really were different: aesthetics has left the building. Every year I run into kids in grade 4 and above, who quite literally cannot draw a straight line, or do simple measurements, with a ruler. But they all want to be mangaka.
I have tried some of this, and indeed, also used their favorite anime characters. There's nothing wrong with anime as such; those artists are hugely skilled, and the art is often beautiful (with producers like Studio Ghibli, the art can in fact be quite breathtaking). But same problem as with anything else: the kids' ambitions hugely outpace their ability, and they end up disappointed, drawing after drawing. I don't know if this doesn't end up actually putting them off art rather than motivating them.
But more fundamental skills they do not want to learn, because that's for little children (you will never convince them of the sad truth, namely that little children produce far better art than they do!). Another problem is something you may have noticed: there is often a sharp difference between the sexes. Girls tend to be far more cooperative, and do not mind trying to do 'beautiful' art, whereas with boys at that age, as Betty Edwards noted, "taste reaches an all-time low." It can be difficult to reconcile the half of the class that enjoys drawing flowers and pretty ponies with the half that wants to show werewolves ripping victims to shreds or some such.
Background: some years ago I visited local schools to ask whether I could put up an ad for art lessons at their school. A Montessori School ended up offering to pay me to come in once a week to teach everyone from grade 4 to 7. The advantage is that they are fairly open about what and how to teach. But there are some unique challenges.
For one thing, all the kids from grade 5 to 7 are in a single class. Also, here in South Africa lots of kids are severely developmentally challenged, and private schools are often used by rich but clueless parents as a convenient place to dump them. The result is that I often have, in the same class, kids whose mental and fine motor abilities range from grade 1 to grade 7, and I am expected to teach them all the same thing. Inevitably the more developed ones get bored, or the less developed ones get frustrated.
Some years ago the classes were still quite small, and I could pay more attention individually; those kids rapidly progressed remarkably well, and I could teach all manner of fun things. I based many lessons on the book You Can Draw in 30 Days, by Mark Kistler, in which he starts out with simple geometric forms and progresses from there to show how those can be used to construct all manner of things. The kids mostly loved it, because even a simple 3D cube that looks realistic was more than they could do at the time. So I had a few kids in class who had almost no talent or initial ability, but who became quite motivated and made good progress:
Since then the school has become more successful - but that also means larger classes with a broader range of ability (or, alas, inability), and more behavioral issues. Also, even in the few years since then, the worldwide disaster called social media has tightened its grip here as well. Maybe it's just my imagination, but in under a decade I seem to have noticed a marked decline in attention spans and willingness to do anything at all that isn't instantly entertaining.
I'm always in two minds as to whether I should indulge their pop culture tastes, or simply ram something more traditional down their throats. Anecdote: when I was their age, like most boys, I did not enjoy poetry lessons. But there was no way out: poetry was rammed down our throats. Little snippets of those poems still sit in my head, and I am grateful that they rammed them in there, because which kid would ever read poetry voluntarily, or develop even the most rudimentary appreciation of it without it being forced on them? (Admittedly, to this day I struggle to understand or appreciate poetry, but without those lessons, I would hardly have known that such an art form even existed).
Kids don't know what they want or what is in their own interest, so one needs to find some balance between forcing them to learn stuff, but also trying to make it at least somewhat enjoyable. Well, you would know how it is: the challenge can be both fun and very frustrating.
Masse
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From my experience there are students who love art. They love having a pencil in their hand, making marks. They love the time being involved in it. If you take a group of students outside to draw most will sit around yakking and drawing childish flowers or trees. Those who love it go off on their own.
Parents want their children to be “creative”, but they’re not because it doesn’t interest them. All young children draw, but some are more intent than others and they don’t stop.
I think classes should sort out the differences. Those not interested should be taught art like any other class: history, content, ideas, etc. Then let those keen students get in with it. They’ll do it whether you teach them or not. What the teacher can do is open up things they’re not aware of. Give the others an initial chance to shine but after that it’s class as normal.
Parents want their children to be “creative”, but they’re not because it doesn’t interest them. All young children draw, but some are more intent than others and they don’t stop.
I think classes should sort out the differences. Those not interested should be taught art like any other class: history, content, ideas, etc. Then let those keen students get in with it. They’ll do it whether you teach them or not. What the teacher can do is open up things they’re not aware of. Give the others an initial chance to shine but after that it’s class as normal.
brianvds
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Yes, I have noticed this: the ones who like art are almost impossible to keep from drawing. Makes me think of a somewhat harsh thing some or other famous art teacher said: the only students worth encouraging are those who cannot be discouraged.
I am endlessly irritated with this notion of "creativity," whatever that even means. No music teacher hands out instruments and tells kids to "be creative" or "just be yourself," or "express yourself." Nobody would ever suggest that a kid can write French poetry if he doesn't understand a word of French, by simply "being creative." At the school where I teach, they have a weekly robotics lesson: the teacher there does not hand out parts of robots and tell them to be creative.
With every single human endeavor, it is generally accepted that it involves some technical skill, that you cannot really do it if you do not know basic techniques, that basic skills need to be practiced, and that indeed, creativity is unleashed by teaching the right skills. The one exception seems to be visual art; there seems to be a very widespread notion, even among psychologists and professional educators, that the prime skill in visual art is "creativity" or "self-expression." This is precisely why kids get so frustrated - they want to learn to draw "properly," but no one can teach them how. So they end up with the same belief as everyone else: that there is something magical and mysterious about being able to draw, instead of it being a skill like any other, which almost anyone can learn.
I very much wish I could choose my students, or arrange them in groups according to talent and willingness, as I saw fit (the school's music teacher has that luxury!) Alas, the school insists that everyone from almost literally brain-damaged kids to brilliant young budding artists be taught the same curriculum. In fairness, if I divided the kids up into groups it would result in more classes having to be taught, which would cost the school more, and budgets around here are always tight.
In any event, as I noted in a previous post, I ended up greatly benefiting from having poetry rammed down my throat; perhaps the same is true of art. It's another popular myth of modern pedagogy: that lessons should always be "fun." No, they shouldn't. It's okay if some of them are fun, but I think it is far more important that they should be meaningful than that they should be fun. Meaning and fun can overlap, but they are not exactly the same thing. I can guarantee you that climbing Mount Everest isn't "fun", but ask people who managed to reach the top whether it was meaningful!
stlukesguild
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I'm always in two minds as to whether I should indulge their pop culture tastes, or simply ram something more traditional down their throats.
I tend to jump back and forth. I’ll have students work on projects rooted in pop culture and then I’ll jump to work rooted in “serious” art. I have had students do projects rooted in the work of Frida Kahlo, Hokusai’s “Great Wave”, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso, etc… I have found that selling such art to students works best when I can interest them in some aspects of the artists’ biography. The kids are often interested, for example, in Frida Kahlo’s tragic biography. My older students tend to love Sugar Skulls when we explore videos on the Mexican Day of the Dead or the Art of Egypt when we get into all the nitty gritty of mummification.
Another problem is something you may have noticed: there is often a sharp difference between the sexes. Girls tend to be far more cooperative, and do not mind trying to do 'beautiful' art, whereas with boys at that age, as Betty Edwards noted, "taste reaches an all-time low." It can be difficult to reconcile the half of the class that enjoys drawing flowers and pretty ponies with the half that wants to show werewolves ripping victims to shreds or some such.
Part of this may be due to the fact that girls mature quicker than boys. Girls also tend to be more inclined to want to please. Still, honestly a lot of my girls are just as likely to be into darker imagery. The real difference is many of the boys give the bare minimum of an effort. It is especially difficult to sell art to older boys in the inner city. Many of them don’t care the least about their academic efforts. So many imagine that they are going to make it as basketball
players or rappers… but even there, they lack the discipline needed to really achieve something.
I tend to jump back and forth. I’ll have students work on projects rooted in pop culture and then I’ll jump to work rooted in “serious” art. I have had students do projects rooted in the work of Frida Kahlo, Hokusai’s “Great Wave”, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso, etc… I have found that selling such art to students works best when I can interest them in some aspects of the artists’ biography. The kids are often interested, for example, in Frida Kahlo’s tragic biography. My older students tend to love Sugar Skulls when we explore videos on the Mexican Day of the Dead or the Art of Egypt when we get into all the nitty gritty of mummification.
Another problem is something you may have noticed: there is often a sharp difference between the sexes. Girls tend to be far more cooperative, and do not mind trying to do 'beautiful' art, whereas with boys at that age, as Betty Edwards noted, "taste reaches an all-time low." It can be difficult to reconcile the half of the class that enjoys drawing flowers and pretty ponies with the half that wants to show werewolves ripping victims to shreds or some such.
Part of this may be due to the fact that girls mature quicker than boys. Girls also tend to be more inclined to want to please. Still, honestly a lot of my girls are just as likely to be into darker imagery. The real difference is many of the boys give the bare minimum of an effort. It is especially difficult to sell art to older boys in the inner city. Many of them don’t care the least about their academic efforts. So many imagine that they are going to make it as basketball
players or rappers… but even there, they lack the discipline needed to really achieve something.
brianvds
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Part of this may be due to the fact that girls mature quicker than boys. Girls also tend to be more inclined to want to please. Still, honestly a lot of my girls are just as likely to be into darker imagery. The real difference is many of the boys give the bare minimum of an effort. It is especially difficult to sell art to older boys in the inner city. Many of them don’t care the least about their academic efforts. So many imagine that they are going to make it as basketball
Yes, alas, I have seen the same thing at some of the schools I have worked at in the past. It is often mixed up in all manner of unholy ways with politics. At one inner city school some years ago, virtually none of the kids did any work at all in any subject. I asked them whether they didn't think it important to get a schooling. They told me, quite straight faced, that in the next election, their favorite politician (a hardline communist with notoriously populist views) would come to power, after which they would all get a house and a car, so it was not necessary for them to get an education.
At another school, a fairly bright kid's marks began to go down and down. Eventually it turned out that he was going to become a professional soccer player, and as such would not need academic excellence anymore. Here's the really funny thing: he was a rather overweight and unfit kid. I tried to suggest to him that he might not be quite fit enough, but it turned out that that would not be a problem either: he was going to be a goal keeper.
And so on and on. Our national leadership often does not help: kids constantly confronted me with the example of our notoriously corrupt and uneducated former president, Jacob Zuma, as example of how far you could go without an education. Why should they bother then? (This was when he was still in power; after his stint in jail they may have modified their views a bit.
)Of course, this kind of attitude starts at home, over which we have no control. Over the years, I have run into neglect that would make your hair stand on end. Except you have probably seen the same thing.
stlukesguild
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My feeling is that you shouldn’t indulge them in their adolescent ways. Make them reach for the next level which pulls them into adulthood. It’s not meant to be easy. Set expectations.
You need to engage, intrigue, or interest your students. You’re not going to have many students develop a passion for Art if you focus solely upon what you deem to be “serious” art. Not everyone who develops a passion for art desires to create fine art paintings or sculpture. There are many who will follow their passion into fashion design, illustration, comics, animation, etc… Even a great number of “fine artists” have built their work at least in part upon popular imagery: Aron Wiesenfeld, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Honore Daumier, Max Beckmann, Picasso, etc…
You need to engage, intrigue, or interest your students. You’re not going to have many students develop a passion for Art if you focus solely upon what you deem to be “serious” art. Not everyone who develops a passion for art desires to create fine art paintings or sculpture. There are many who will follow their passion into fashion design, illustration, comics, animation, etc… Even a great number of “fine artists” have built their work at least in part upon popular imagery: Aron Wiesenfeld, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Honore Daumier, Max Beckmann, Picasso, etc…
stlukesguild
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At one inner city school some years ago, virtually none of the kids did any work at all in any subject. I asked them whether they didn't think it important to get a schooling. They told me, quite straight faced, that in the next election, their favorite politician (a hardline communist with notoriously populist views) would come to power, after which they would all get a house and a car, so it was not necessary for them to get an education.
We have a certain orange politician here who famously declared that he loved the “poorly educated.”
We have a certain orange politician here who famously declared that he loved the “poorly educated.”
Masse
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No, and I wasn’t suggesting that.
brianvds
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In a previous post I mentioned having poetry rammed down my throat in primary school. In those days, teachers had to follow a prescribed curriculum, and it was mostly "serious" poetry, so perhaps not always all that accessible either. What I do remember though is that the teachers were all very enthusiastic indeed about the poems. And so I would guess that if you love the subject matter yourself, it will go some way towards getting students to like it, if not immediately, then at least eventually.
In the meantime, the school has informed me they're going to have mixed classes consisting of kids from grade 4 to grade 6, which will add to the difficulty. It does spare me the bother of having to come up with two separate curriculums.
brianvds
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All politicians love the poorly educated, whether they'll admit to that or not.
In our local case, last year, after having Tefloned off one criminal charge after the other, he was finally found guilty of one: firing a gun in public. He has yet to be sentenced, will probably appeal etc, so we'll have to see what will happen. But even just the guilty verdict already helps.
Politics: From the Greek 'poly', meaning many, and 'tics', which are blood-sucking parasites. Which is why I'll now step off the subject.
Masse
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By the way, if you use inverted comments then you’re suggesting a direct quote. In this case I didn’t use the term “serious art” or deem anything serious art.
txomsy
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This is a very old topic. About two decades ago, I realized I had to improve my skills to defend and pitch my work, so I decided to look at the masters of Oratory. Learnt lots of interesting tips. But one thing drew my attention, in his work, Quintilian starts by describing how a school should be run. Seems he was a school teacher at some point. Anyway, the tips, tricks, advice he gives in the first chapter of his Institutio Oratoria is as valid today as it was 2000 years ago. He advocated for mixed age classes as a way for elder or more proficient students to help guide the rest and to become emulation examples. So, there is a way to have mixed levels and profit from it.
OTOH, it makes me sad to think that he already had valid and tested working solutions 2000 years ago and we are still arguing and ignoring their advice. O, well...
Added: writing from memory, so maybe it wasn't the first chapter, but it certainly was among the firsts. Plus: Quintilian has been deemed one of the epitomes of Rethoric until mid-20th century, and highly influential through the ages, which says a lot.
OTOH, it makes me sad to think that he already had valid and tested working solutions 2000 years ago and we are still arguing and ignoring their advice. O, well...
Added: writing from memory, so maybe it wasn't the first chapter, but it certainly was among the firsts. Plus: Quintilian has been deemed one of the epitomes of Rethoric until mid-20th century, and highly influential through the ages, which says a lot.
stlukesguild
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We used to have mixed age classrooms… even one-room school houses in the US until the 20th century. More recently, many have come to believe that all children should be promoted at the same age… regardless of the fact that we recognize that all children don’t learn at the same rate… nor do individual children all master each topic/subject at the same rate. Of course where would all the PhDs in curriculum design and educational theory be without the continual influx of new ways of teaching?
brianvds
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I have a feeling there are many PhDs in education who have never spent a week in front of a classroom.
Anyway, the school has since decided to after all keep the classes apart, making for smaller groups, at similar level of development, that are easier to teach. I have seen it argued that with mixed-age groups, the older children can help teach the younger ones. With some subjects, or in some circumstances, this may even work too, but from what I have seen, under such conditions, all teaching of curriculum ceases, and the kids just sit and babble.
