Free Your Mind
Abstract. As teachers, our goal is to teach academic content based on Standards. How boring can that be sometimes?! Do we live to work or work to live? Making the most of your teaching day should extend beyond what and how you teach. What do you want your students to get out of the what you are teaching? We always want our students to be creative in their efforts. But how creative can a student be if completing handouts and/or making presentation boards is the norm?
In an attempt to get my students to be as creative as they possibly can be, I allow them to paint watercolor, if they wish, whenever they finish their in-class work. If this sounds like a stretch from academic content, hold on. I set up parameters up for their art work. At the back of my room, I have a stack of white 5x5 card stock. This is the canvas on which they paint. Students know they are to create art based on any one of the current academic studies. This is where it gets difficult. They cannot give me what I call ‘obvious art’. I do not want to see the word Math written on the card in crayon, with a painted rainbow background. There is no real creativity here. I want to see something that will somehow convey their understanding of the current Math concept, perhaps shapes for geometry or symbols to represent a formula. For Language Arts, students can produce watercolor that may depict a portion of the story whether it be plot, character, or setting. Here again, I don’t want a scene painted. This is too obvious and becomes cartoony. This gets the students to think, really think about what they are learning because they are forced to replay the concept or story over and over in their head.
I tell my students to Free Their Minds. Paint me something that will require me to think. This means painting something that is not outright obvious. I might even need to look at it for a while before I can even figure out what they have painted. I like that. The watercolor might be a close up on a portion of a significant piece of furniture, or plant. It may be a single item, offset on the page because centered would be too obvious. It may be a jumbled mixture of colors, or items from the story that convey the confusion described in a plot. My students have generated hundreds of these watercolor cards for the class and I post every one of them on the wall. Encouraging the student to Free Their Mind takes some work on your part. As a teacher, you work with your students to try and produce fresh results. But unless you explain, even abstractly, what you are looking for in their watercolor art you’ll get boring, mundane, and obvious art. Free Their Minds.
Dolph Petris
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