Post #2 "Yes and....I have a confession"

Confession
After two very challenging weeks teaching along side the Anti-Art teacher from Burn-Out Town, along with other life challenges I felt my "Juicy" creative fule was drying up fast and soon I would crumble into a fine dust.  Just two hours ago I seriously contemplated 8740 Suicide. I was ready to just give up and end it so I could slip into a peaceful mindlessness cushioned with bad sit-coms and big pillows. But suddenly Eisner's book fell on the floor and revealed chapter 3. I decided to give it one more glance and there on the page was my salvation!
The quote,
"The surest road to hell in a classroom is to stick to the lesson plan, no matter what" (Eisner)
became illuminated and I heard the choir of dead artists singing, "You're not alone, stay, stay and save them from which they know no better." "We will show you the way, stay!"
So here I am. Eisner has ushered me back and is showing me, in the first few pages of chapter 3, all the reasons why I am witnessing, first hand, the 'killing' of young imaginations.
He is reaffirming for me that my ideas and beliefs are sound and true and that the ill feeling I have in my stomach is from having to be a silent bystander while anti-art torture takes place inside the sacred temple of imagination.
When reading the quote above I knew it was a sign for me to keep 8740 alive and use its enlightened teachings as a protective shield and sword to ward off anti-art ghosts from the dark ages.
The anti-art teacher has been sticking to a lesson that was implemented back in November and is forcing students to finish a very tedious, ill planned, mosaic made by cutting small bits of colors from magazines and pasting them onto intricate drawn boarders around a centrally drawn animal. In the two weeks I have been there over half of the total students have fallen into hell and are becoming defiant, snarling anti-art demons. Most pretent like they are working or do the bare minimum. Some have chosen not to do any more work since it has lost all appeal and instead has become a punishment.
Offense number one:
The anti-art teacher merely transmits information with little or no instruction or examples and instructs students to copy a castel tower "EXACTLY" how it looks on the handout. Eisner explains how each student will mediate and modify what is being conveyed and in this case several students were dropping like flies as the blood left their sweet little faces and they sank down saying, "I hate this, I dont like art, I cant draw like that, I cant make it look exactly like that." The point was not to mimic but to notice and to translate yet the anti-art teacher did not explain the point and did not show tricks or even give tips.
The "Situation" set up by the anti-art teacher did not promote a creative appetite to learn. The students were not learning through qualitative related experiences, even though that was most likely the purpose of the lesson; instead, they were learning how to follow directions and how to dislike art since it was a tedious chore to keep them busy and quiet.
In Creating Meaning Through Art by Simpson, and others, they state, "Factors that got my students involved included my understanding of them, the classroom environment I created , and the teaching strategies that I used." Viktor Lowenfeld wrote that, "Motivation is meaningful if it is adequate to the developmental level and is keyed to specific interests of the child"
Offense number two:
Not participating in improvisation and saying, "Yes and..." as explored in Imagination First. The anti-art teacher teaches art like it is a serious math class and shehe uses what Eisner calls, canned scripts. Shehe expects the correct response to hisher prefabricated, formulaic instruction. "Externally defined routines might be appropriate for workers on an assembly line...; they are not appropriate for teachers."
I know it sounds bad, and I was being a bit mello dramatic, but the anti-art teacher has good intentions after all. Shehe got lost in the woods along the way and has developed, "secondary ignorance"; that is, by not knowing that you dont know." Which is part of how Eisner has helped me to understand how the anti-art teacher had to face, "the arduous task of trying to figure out on 'hisher' own how things went and what might be done better."
(Stay tuned......more to come)