I was talking with Oscar tonight about his paintings. He's created these wonderful representations of floods, cyclones and war, and is currently showing them in a few sites. He plans on selling the paintings, but only after he's shown them in a few places. He's a gifted artist and has a rare perspective.
I asked him when he plans on selling them, and he responded that they would be sold only after he shows everything together. And he doesn't want to sell everything here in town - not for lack of trying, but because people don't see what he sees. He wants people to see the underlying meaning - more than just colors and people. Immediately, I thought of my struggles in the classroom, and how so much of my time is spent telling people to see past the words and drawings and look for the meaning. Sometimes they find it quite unexpectedly and are unsure of what to do. Like when I held up a pen as an example of something that cannot die, so therefore it is inorganic - and one of my students argued that the pen lives when it writes and dies when it can't write any more. She got laughed at by the rest of the class, and though I wanted to praise her for thinking critically about what I was saying, I couldn't get off the topic and hope to teach the material. But there was a part of me that came alive in that moment as it did tonight as well. Oscar revealed that there was a connection in this artwork, and he wanted people to see the connection and understand it completely before they took one piece of the puzzle away. Because they wouldn't be able to understand the piece they took out of context. And he doesn't meet many people who understand it here.
As spiritually fulfilling as it was to make that connection, it's frustrating to realize how inaccessible other people's spirituality is here, or to know if it's really there. I hear a couple people speaking of it here and there, but it doesn't seem to be a pervading everyday influence. The parallels with education are too strong to ignore. There is a certain spirituality that any educational discipline has, even such traditionally rote subjects as math or chemistry. Once you see it, numbers and atoms come alive and dance in your head, trying on various combinations until one works. And so is the way with art. You look at a painting and all of these representations of life jump into your head, waltzing into different positions and adjusting themselves ever so slightly until the spirit of the creation moves and winds along smoothly. You don't see colors and figures, but feel an emotion and an understanding that transcends the medium. This is what I teach every day, and I try different methods and different philosphical approaches to it. But the idea is still the same. Look beyond the details. A painting can have mistakes, but the same feeling is conveyed, just like I can teach Biology in Portuguese (broken, no less) and it's the same Biology I learned in perfect English. Not because of the translation, but because of the deeper meaning that causes us to say "Plants use the energy of the sun..." But my students see these only as words.
Maybe my students are all just existentialists and just see a word as a word and nothing more...
These new lessons are working out quite well now, though I'm having the same frustrations just in different ways. The upside is that I'm using a visual method to explain concrete information which I think caters to more learning styles. And I offer plenty of opportunity to participate, helping those who need to practice the information. Because I'm more of a visual learner, I memorize the lesson by the second time I've given it, which helps tremendously with my ability to explain myself all along the way. I think I'll try this system for the first couple units of next trimester's material and see how it goes.
Peace
John
