I’m no artist. I don’t even know if I qualify as a writer since I’ve never made any money at writing. I take that back. I was a newspaper reporter for a while and wrote a lot of obituaries, but that wasn’t my specialty. I don’t think I had a specialty except that I could write a story very fast with few misspelled words. It was important to turn in your story by 10 o‘clock in the morning so the newspaper would be delivered before supper that night.
Anyway, I digress. I’m no artist. I know the primary colors and appreciate people who can draw animals, flowers and people without tracing a coloring book. I learned art appreciation in the third grade at J.M. Lindsay Elementary School at Gainesville, Texas, in 1958. There were two third grade teachers. One of them was Mrs. Bell, and the other was not.
Mrs. Bell freely admitted she was fifty years old and proudly showed off her old age spots on her hands. We were her first class to teach—ever. She had raised her kids and decided to go back to college and become a teacher, and she was having a wonderful time at it. My first grade teacher was a young woman who went straight from high school to college to my classroom. She felt an obligation to act all grownup and serious. Mrs. Bell, on the other hand, had nothing to prove to anyone so she was as giddy as a school girl.
Her passion was art. We learned primary colors, secondary colors, what tempura paint was, and block printing. Anytime we wanted to stand up in front of class and tell a story or a joke Mrs. Bell let us do it, even if we weren’t very good.
The other third grade class, however, had a teacher with no sense of humor so she had to stick strictly with reading, writing and arithmetic. There was always a little stink on the playground during recess, with the children in the other class telling us that we were not learning anything but art. As everyone well knows, children have achieved the ability to be arrogant by the third grade, and this group was filled with grandmasters. They said the word “art” with such disdain that you would think it was one of the seven deadly sins. When we told Mrs. Bell back in class what they had said, she assured us art was no such thing.
We learned how to cut a pattern out of a sheet of thick rubber, glue it to a block of wood and make a print. We learned how to press a design into a thin sheet of copper. We put string dipped in different colors, put them between two sheets of paper and pulled them out, which created an interesting design. We put all colors of crayons on a piece of paper and then covered them with a layer of black crayon. We took a pencil and gently scraped off part of the black crayon to reveal a colorful pattern.
Our class put on a lot of little plays to illustrate songs and stories. We laughed, we had fun and I have a sneaking suspicion that we learned just as much or more as the students who sat through dry lectures by the so-called good teacher.
From the fourth grade through high school graduation I kept a mental note of how the students from Mrs. Bell’s bohemian third grade class ranked academically. We did pretty well.
Since then I’ve researched such things and learned that the arts stimulated the same sections of the brain which is used for math and science. Also you can’t learn very much if you’re bored and stare out the window. We never looked out the window because we never knew what Mrs. Bell was going to pull on us next.
School districts all around the country are tightening budgets because they believe the only good education is a cheap one. Mrs. Bell taught us the only good education was the fun one.