Why would a student being exposed to art and music along with his/her “regular” school studies, have been so disastrous? Perhaps I would have been a big better at science and math (and less shy about my lack of aptitude in both) if it had been more interestingly presented.

Your famine is my feast, I guess.

Flowerchild- Steiner waldorf schools are pseudo religious. They are based on anthroposophy; their “creativity” is about awakening the children to spirit worlds; rote learning is rife.
Try reading the articles here:
http://www.waldorfcritics.org/

And Helsbelle, you may have hated using music in a science lesson, but what about the students who express themselves through music, who have music as their “first language”? In a traditional classroom, that student’s skills would be undervalued. To me, it’s all about giving opportunities for the varied skills of all the learners in a classroom (yes, including writing, reading, and speaking, as well as art and music), and increasing the confidence of the students to express themselves in multiple ways, including the ones they don’t feel confident in.

Plus, art and music are the first to go when things are getting cut. Your music teacher will get cut to half time, the division will question why they need an art specialist – if it doesn’t happen in the classroom, it may not happen at all.

I see how my classmates react in art and music classes – we’re all so unsure of our skills, we’ve been taught that we’re not creative, we don’t have an innate talent, so we’ve assumed that we’ll never be able to develop it. We just have shut off that side of us, and our profs have had pushed us really hard to see ourselves as creative individuals. I just don’t want my students to grow up and not value art and music and drama as valid methods of expression. Putting art and music in the classroom on a daily basis gives such a powerful message about the value of those subjects, and that’s so important to do.

What I extrapolate from Ito, Alex and Jenonymous’s stories is that kids (and growns too) learn better when they are engaged in what they are supposed to be learning. This arts integration is simply another way of getting at that goal.

Agreed! As long as it works it’s great. I suspect the teacher’s enthusiasm counts more than the method, though; if the teacher is engaged the kids will be drawn in.

Aptitude? many people say they can’t do art or music, yet never do kids get out of math claiming they have no aptitude for it…

Studies have proven again and again, that for objective thought and true maturation on cognitive and emotional levels to be reached, the arts must be included in an education.

Good work George!

It’s OK for people to be good at different things.

by Political Correctness I mean the idea of just bunching everything together out of fear that someone might be left out.

I’m sorry but my struggle to “like” or “appreciate” art and music in school is what ultimately lead me to understand that I don’t gave to be a good painter to enjoy a painting. I think a student SHOULD struggle with a subject (or two) in school. In life you will never be great, or even good, at everything. But to me sticking through something difficult is just as important a lesson as the actual lesson itself.

@ Jenonymous, pyota, and Ilovechocolatemilk,

thank you for understanding what I was getting at.

I’d just rather live in a world that doesn’t look on adversity as something to avoid at all costs but something to be overcome. I can but dream.
Perhaps I prize the qualities of self-reliance and perseverance more highly than most.

They were learning about simple machines. Each one tried to lift a five gallon bucket of water, to see how heavy it felt, then lifted the same bucket with an overhead block and tackle rigged to disadvantage.

Afterwards each child used hammer & wedge to split a hardwood log… when they left, all those kids understood levers, inclined planes, pulleys and wheels.

No pencils or papers were used or necessary.

Nobody got left behind.

At the interview: “Math? I’m great at math. As long as I can do it to interpretive dance.”

I’m all about the value in overcoming a challenge, but much of the time something is challenging for no good reason. I’d much rather spend countless hours struggling to do something that is genuinely difficult, rather than struggling because something is poorly taught.

A lot of things that kids have trouble with in school is difficult for them, but could be much easier if approached from a different angle. This program looks to provide a bunch of different angles on things.

Looking back at the time I spent in K-12, I’d guess 60-90% of it was spent bored out of my mind, with the schools serving as babysitting more than anything else. Yeah, I was a bright kid. However, even the people that had trouble with things were bored out of their mind for pretty much the same ratio, because none of us actually liked the material, or even found it the least bit engaging. It wasn’t the difficulty of the material, it was the dullness and ineffectiveness of the presentation. I think the whole concept of “it’s hard and boring because that’s just the way it is, now suck it up and memorize this!” is completely bogus. For any topic out there, there’s someone who knows how to make it fascinating. These people are doing it with the arts.

Not to mention the value of tangential learning. I know a lot of my world geography (not to mention the relative sizes of different aircraft) because of a couple airline-management games for the Super Nintendo. If someone is an enthusiast for something, they’ll learn it on their own, and they’ll pick up a lot about vaguely-related topics. Most of the stuff I’ve learned over the years didn’t come from being directly taught it. I would read ahead or lag behind in most classes, making sure to keep in a position to pass the tests but otherwise going at my own pace, or doing things from one class in another.

Having facts told at me from a book, unless I’m enthralled by the book or subject matter, is a sure-fire way for me to not learn them. On the other hand, in a music theory class where we were learning the basics of different tuning systems, I was fascinated in the back row, deriving the mathematical basis for them myself and seeing that the numbers we were given did, in fact, check out. Half hour of math in the back of a music class, and nobody was any the wiser.

If I learned anything from having challenges, it was how to work on my side projects in class without raising the teacher’s suspicion. I wrote a saxophone trio in one of my programming classes, and have written programs in history classes.

@gloria, sorry but i think you have the facts upside down: there is a shortage of people entering scientific career paths (which are admittedly difficult). meanwhile, the humanities departments of universities are teeming with applicants, which is why we are in a situation where people with masters degrees in fields which have little practical application such as english are forced to accept unskilled jobs at low wages. i also take exception with your claim that the arts do not improve society in a practical, material way.

Michael:
Oh, great. That sounds like another one of those gradeless, structureless, new age feel-gooderies.

We did almost the exact same thing with wedges (on ice blocks not wood) and buckets of water with levers..in science class in school. You can do multimedia interactive teaching without making everything a game or coating it in what sounds like a lot of hippy dippy feelgood BS.

Technique is as important as content when learning new subject matter.

There’s a fine line between creative teaching and turning everything into a game to make it “fun.”

I would rather see low-income schools get better labs, music programs, etc and make that a focus before pushing this kind of program. You may be surprised how well kids respond to just THAT.

Case in point: My Mom is a retired science teacher who taught “below level” kids in a BAD district. They didn’t have a single microscope for her classes to use–there was ONE that the advance-placement kids could use under supervision.

So Mom hauled out her old mirror-lit, almost cartoonishly retrograde microscope. From when she got HER Master’s. And an ancient box of glass slides and ultra-delicate glass slipcovers. And iodine and Q-tips from our medicine cabinet. The last few items considered Dangerous Scary Stuff because it all might break/cut someone/poison someone.

And she had each and every kid line up and did a cheek swab, stained it, and let them look at their own cells under a microscope. Most had never even seen a microscope before.

She spent the rest of the school year hauling her microscope back and forth (she was told by the super that it may walk if left at the school) and every time she took it out, the kids suddenly perked up and wondered what she’s put under it next for them to see. Onions? Bacteria? Planaria? Algae? (we had a goldfish pond out back that was an endless supply of microscopic fun).

After much wrangling she finally also got the department to give her ONE frog from the advanced class to dissect in front of the class, and a scary scary kit complete with scalpel to do it.

It ENGAGED a lot of those kids. Even the ones who were still bad at science, who never studied, who came from bad homes, who took drugs, at least stopped cutting class and maybe learned something.

That didn’t take interperative dances about economics or any BS like that; all it took was some kind of equal access (such as it was) to the right learning materials that the district should have been providing ANYWAY. Let’s work on economic parity for schools before we start sprinkling unicorn dandruff on everything.

I think part of the problem is that the people going into elementary education are by and large humanities people. Get some more mathematicians and scientists teaching, and I think you’ll find more students liking math and science. The teachers grew up with teachers who said “math and science are hard”, and continue to perpetuate the attitude, or at least never got to like it themselves and therefore are quite lousy at teaching it.

Of course, the fiction part is important – I wouldn’t take most SF as being textbook…but I have since cultivated an (admittedly diletanttish) interest in biology (especially evolutionary theory – beautiful, astounding stuff) and some of the more “wowee” aspects of physics. This is not exactly the same as the post above, but SF is part of the arts and it has led me to explore real world scientific theory. Much science teaching *is* probably too dry. Those that are interested in it for its own sake will get hooked in regardless.

The people that we need to engage are those who will never grow up to work in the sciences, but will form that vast mass of people that believe things like evolution is a massively flawed theory (depending who you believe up to 75% of them here in the UK! Madness!)

I think what I’m trying to say is that whilst, yeah, what we’re seeing in the post above may not be the greatest idea ever, we may just have to accept forcing kids into rote learning just is not going to work.

What I extrapolate from Ito, Alex and Jenonymous’s stories is that kids (and growns too) learn better when they are engaged in what they are supposed to be learning. This arts integration is simply another way of getting at that goal.