I'll admit straight out that I have a bias 0n this subject. I have taken an art class every year, even if it's only a semester long, since I took a GATE art class in third grade. First it was GATE Art, then GATE Art Through Geometry, and then GATE Ceramics. Once I got into middle school, it was a semester class in sixth grade. IN seventh grade it was Art Club and totem pole carving, and in eighth grade I took art all year. I have taken at least one art class every year of high school. Freshman year it was Art 1. As a sophomore, I took Art 2. As a junior, I took Art 3 and Photography. This year, as a senior, I'm in AP Studio Art, Printing and Graphics, Advanced Drama, and I TA in an Art 1 class. The event that prompted this blog occurred in that Art 1 class.
There is a boy in my Art 1 class with ADD. He's not always a model student. He got suspended recently, for telling off a campus monitor. But in art, for the most part, he's just so incredibly centered. And he's good, too. He has his off days, sure, where he fucks around and gets scolded. So, a few weeks ago, they started a still life from life. It's this massive pile of stuff in the center of the room, and they have to pick an area and draw it. One day, while I'm standing in my teacher's office talking to her, I glance over and there he is, sitting at another kid's table, helping him compose. Completely unprompted. He saw him struggling and wanted to help. And it just further proved to me, that here's this kid with a penchant for misbehavior and a pretty bad rap with the teachers helping another kid just because he wanted to.
THAT is the power of art. That is the power of a class with no rights or wrongs, no formulas, no one set way of doing things. Art provides an outlet, an escape. How dare the school district deem us unimportant and take away our funding.
Just because we aren't a fucking sports team, and we don't have games, people don't cheer for us, we don't bring the school local acclaim? How DARE they? If you take art out of schools, you take away the only thing holding some of your students together. And if your school isn't helping your students? Then why the fuck do you even bother?
