Thursday, March 19, 2009

Taking school kids to the art gallery .. the rest of the story


"Naked guy on beach with Death"

Kids at the Art Gallery

I dunno if I'm taking things too seriously after the classroom based
assessment with the Picasso "woman in a hat in a shirt that shows too
much" and the surrealistic "lipstick on a garage". I visited Seattle's
free Frye gallery, and they had all sorts of 2nd and 3rd grade kids
being show the paintings. One lady asked her kids "what do you see"?
One kid said "well the dark lighting makes it look like a jail".
"There's a chain on his leg" "There's a soldier with a gun behind
him". The painting was about a revolutionary condemned to death.


"Sin"

On
the wall behind the kids were two big pictures of fairly undraped
women, and in the room behind that, big pictures of half naked men,
fully naked men, and a room full of naked men wrestling. There was a
movie booth of a stop action rat / wolf with a girl sprouting from his
behind plus what looks like his "ding a ling" from his front.


"Girl stuck to anatomically correct wolf" by Nathalie Djurberg

This sort of has
the same feel of assessments that assume 4th graders should be exposed
to topics in writing (write a short story with sentences your first
day in first grade), mathematics (design a bicycle trailer 3-view
isometric projection drawing in 4th grade with some assistance from a
professional carpenter), research (cite an unpublished thesis) or
music (sing from sheet music from sight, no piano) science (design a
lab experiment including beaker and bunsen burner in 5th grade
isolating two different variables) that most college educated adults
never have to do, and the coffee table book I saw a parent give to his
3rd grade of Picasso at a gifted child information meeting that had
distorted naughty parts on every other picture.

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