My Favorites from "Top 10 Reasons to Support the Arts"

I found this list today on Twitter.  There are lots of reasons the arts are important, but it seems like the arts folks are being asked, endlessly, to justify the existence of such pursuits. I wonder if there will ever be a day when we won't need to quantify and justify something as integral to our humanity and human experience as artistic inquiry and expression.  In the meantime, here are some of my favorites from this post from the National Performing Arts Convention, For Those Who Like Lists: Top 10 Reasons to Support the Arts, with some comments from me in italics: 

10. True prosperity…The arts are fundamental to our humanity.  They ennoble and inspire us—fostering creativity, goodness, and beauty.  They help us express our values, build bridges between cultures, and bring us together regardless of ethnicity, religion, or age.  When times are tough, the arts are salve for the ache.

I remember when the Twin Towers were destroyed, along with the lives of thousands of people.  My Celtic music band was scheduled to play an outdoor community concert a few days later.  There was a lot of talk back and forth about whether we should perform as planned or not.  The local arts council in this community decided we should go ahead with our plans.  In our hotel room the tv was filled with horrific images and never-ending talk about what had happened and why.  In the lovely South Carolina downtown city park space we saw in front of us people of all ages, multi-generational family groups, the largest crowd we'd ever had at an event like this.  We had never quite experienced the kind of focus and energy we received that night.  There was a palpable connectedness between everyone present.  We didn't talk much about recent events and we didn't change our show in any major way.  We just showed up, showed our humanity, and filled a need in that moment.  It's an experience I will never forget.

7. 21st Century workforce . . . reports by The Conference Board show creativity is among the top applied skills sought by employers.  72 percent of business leaders say creativity is of high importance when hiring.  The biggest creativity indicator?  A college arts degree.  Their report concludes, “…the arts—music, creative writing, drawing, dance—provide skills sought by employers of the third millennium.”
 
I hear a lot about the need for schools to produce (?) 'creative, out-of-the-box' thinkers in the name of business.  Yes, and for many other things as well.  We need good problem solvers in all areas of life.  I'm not sure, however, if a college arts degree is all you need to succeed in life or that (as I read it) the arts are the only way to learn to be creative. 
 
The arts are a creative pursuit, to be sure, but there are many other ways of thinking creatively.  It is possible to transfer a creative, problem solving mindset between subject areas, but an arts degree is not the only way.  Myself, I got a BA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA in the social sciences.  TESC is an interdisciplinary state university where the focus is on thematically and question based inquiry; essentially, learning how to make connections between ideas and information, and to ask questions, find the answers, and then ask more questions, no matter what subject you're interested in. 
 
6. Improved academic performance…longitudinal data of 25,000 students demonstrate that students with an education rich in the arts have higher GPAs and standardized test scores, lower drop-out rates, and even better attitudes about community service.  These benefits are reaped by students regardless of socio-economic status.  Children motivated by the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other academic subject areas such as math and science.

Despite my assertions in reply to #7, I still think the arts are one of the best ways to engage and motivate children in learning.  I find the last line of this section to bear out in my own work teaching math and percussive dance in an integrated, problem solving environment:

Children motivated by the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other academic subject areas such as math and science.

Exploring the Nature of Numbers

I've written elsewhere in this blog about how I am remediating myself by learning math along with my currently five year old daughter.  I am a classic case of someone who probably would have LOVED math but instead got confused by a worksheet in kindergarten (something about bumblebees) and never fully recovered.  In high school I loved geometry so much that I was motivated to memorize all the theroms.  I was never able to apply what I learned, but I think it was the challenge and process of understanding interesting rules that caught my attention.  Plus, geometry is visual, which is my thing too. 

I really had to address my math phobia when I came up with the bright idea to integrate math with percussive dance, but what I realize now is that my love of geometry (which some people, I've heard, call the only 'real' math, but that's another argument conversation) has really served me in that effort.  And, the effort I've put in over many years to make sure I really understand the math the fits with percussive dance has also restored some of that natural mathematical curiousity which I lost back in kindergarten in the '70's.  I am really starting to see how math can be playful and full of interesting ideas and questions and it's own form of inquiry unto itself, just like being playful in the process of creating percussive patterns.  It's okay to ask questions that have more than one answer.  Not only that, it's FUN!

So, anyhow, this morning my daughter was teaching her toy cat Matilda her letters and some basic arithmetic.  They do other kinds of math in her kindergarten, but she seems taken with what numbers are and how they get bigger and smaller.  Here is a snapshot of our conversation this morning.  First she tells me:

"I'll write 100 really BIG because it's a BIG number and 1000 even BIGGER. And then a quadrillion."

This is really interesting to me, actually.  I do, despite what I've said so far, understand the concept of scale and size and amounts, etc.  But, I read somewhere that the whole 100 days of school project (which practically every kindergartener experiences) started back in the 1980's and I'm sorry I missed out!  On the 100th day of school this year she brought in 100 dried chickpeas in a little baggie.  I was surprised that it actually didn't look like very much.  She also, as a joke (and this was totally her idea) brought:

"One hundred pennies in the form of a dollar bill." 

My daughter has also had some questions about if the numbers ever end.  I think she was happy when we read a book called The Cat in Numberland which was about the Hotel Infinity where numbers keep moving in and there are always enough rooms for them, and it seemed to provide the answer she was looking for.  She still tells me she loves me 'to the end of the numbers' which is very sweet, even if it's not accurate!

In her kindergarten class she's been learning basic addition and subtraction.  She comes home and writes down little equations.  This morning she said, "Tell Matilda [her toy cat] what subtraction is."  I said, "What can you tell her?"  She answered, "When you take away a number to make a smaller one." 

Also on the subject of subtraction, at some point recently she started trying to take away a larger number from a smaller one, which led me to comment, "Did you know there are numbers smaller than zero?"  I tried to explain but I didn't know if I made sense or if she understood, until this morning.  She was writing down an equation for her cat.  This is what she said while she wrote it out:

"Three minus eight equals....zero!  And I'll put a minus sign on the zero because it's less than zero."

My response?

"I think I'll go out and get you a number line!"

Multiplication Models Poster

Even though I don't do anything with multiplication in my program, I still thought this multiplication models poster from Natural Math was too good (not to mention too beautiful) to not share!

Update August 2013: This poster is available for purchase here. :-)

Give This a Try!

A student's illustration of his Jump Pattern A, at his own volition, no prompting.

Start in center.  Feet together.  Assume all four beats move on a Jump.

The first two beats work just fine as written.

In Beat 3 you are still facing forward, right and left foot are not labled, but the arrows give you a clue.

How far do you turn on Beat 4?

Can you do this pattern backwards (a reflection of the beat order, e.g. 4, 3, 2, 1)?

How else can you rearrange these four beats to make a different pattern?  Did it work?

Which combination of beats/moves did you like the best?

Video: Are Mathematicians Creative?

From the YouTube description of the video (below):

"Is doing research in mathematics a creative process? When mathematicians talk of their subject as beautiful, what do they mean? What are their motivations? Their dreams? Their disappointments? These themes are explored in the collection of five short films produced as part of Mathematical Ethnographies project. The focus is not on mathematics, but on the people who create and teach mathematics - on mathematicians."

Some of my favorite bits from the video:

"Like writing a sonnet, you have to conform to precise rules but having that structure there to constrain you somehow enhances the creativity."

"To be good at mathematics you have to develop a new insight."

"There are moments where things become clear, it comes out of nowhere.  I'll be in the shower, cycling, and somehow the answer comes."

"It's hard to see how asking a question no one has ever thought of before is a logical process."

"I always think it's nearer to architecture rather than to other arts; one is trying to build this formal structure up and there are supports and girders and there are connections..."

Are Mathematicians creative? If creativity is a process more than a product, I think then that the answer is yes. What do you think?