Painting Popsicles
This attempt at painting popsicles, introduced my “melting popsicles” metaphor… the realisation that time is slipping away, while we worry about the mechanics of getting started. Whether it is writing that article, or clearing up the clutter, or making that first mark on the canvas, for some of us, the period before getting really started, is one in which external help and support is needed. That’s the writer’s block syndrome. Under stress, we freeze. If adults experience this, how much more so do the kids (who have already experienced failure in schools) feel the sense of not knowing how to start? When they freeze, they opt out of their instructional opportunities. They can’t hear the classroom teacher. This is where you come in. That’s what coaching is about. Patience, loving support, and strategies to help them begin. Just get them hooked enough to begin. Sometimes it will be with a book like “Shark Attack”, or drawing circles with the compass, or talking about sports, or actually taking them for a walk around the school and having a real conversation and listening to their concerns. You have to get them to want to start and to “just start it!”
This exercise to paint popsicles, brought meaning to Dali’s melting clocks which never really made sense to me before. The melting clocks show the concept of time as represented by a time piece, in a dynamic not static state. I now had a very real personal experience of time ticking away as I worried that my still life was melting before my very eyes while I pondered how to and where to start the painting. The negative self talk begun to sound louder and louder in my head. “You aren’t a painter. Stop wasting your time. Find something more productive to do.” It is sad to see young children with these negative voices in their little heads, already programmed to feel themselves as “stupid” and “failures”. Our job is to help them replace that negative self talk, which will happen when they begin to experience success.
It isn’t that the struggling learners can’t succeed; rather, it is that they haven’t had the kind of support needed to help them to get started, to show them the process, the need to stay with it and to help them persevere to the end.
As I persevered to the end of this painting exercise, the threat of the popsicles melting into an undistinguishable mess of mush was real. I realized that I needed to get started before it was too late. But I had a reservoir of resilience to draw on. The struggling learners don’t, and we have to help them build that reserve. Under the pressure of timed tests, many of the children give up before they even get started. The pressure is real, and without support they cave and develop a sense of helplessness, of perpetual failure, of not knowing how to start again. They put anything on the paper, put their heads down and say, “I’m finished”. Marking any answer on the multiple choice tests until the entire test booklet is “completed” is not unusual. The pressure to “complete” the test so that they don’t get into trouble, is greater than the need for understanding or taking time to check their work. This “fill-in-the-bubble-test-driven-multiple-choice” era of assessment that masquerades as improving teaching & learning , does a great disservice to the teachers who are not allowed the time needed to teach for mastery, and gives the struggling learners and their parents, the impression that bubbling in the “correct answer” is what school is about, and/or all that they need to do. Students have been advised to leave no answers blank, because even if they know nothing, the probability that they will get a correct answer and pass is greater than if they leave it blank. So they have no idea how to get started with real learning. We have to teach them.
“Time and tide wait for no man”. Make that Time, Tide and Uneaten Popsicles wait for no man”. Time is fleeting, and is essentially melting like the popsicles. The underlying message from this exercise is that we need to “Just Start It”, not “Just Do It” as we’ve heard constantly from a commerical for footwear that I acutally like and wear. Sometimes we don’t know “how to” or “what to do” and procrastination kicks in while we are stuck in the phase of “pre-doing”, which is essentially, a “pre-judging” of both ourselves and of the struggling learner’s attempts. Suspend judgement. Focus on getting started. Help them to begin, and to keep going before the lollipops melt. Melting lollipops, melting clocks, melting time, unwritten books, lost opportunities. Get going!
Testing pressures on the kids evoke fear. Help them to seize the time available to them, without fear, without self doubt and the negative self talk that says, “don’t try, you can’t do it.” Help them to get going. To “just start it”, and to know that you will be there to coach and support them all the way. My art teachers have been doing that for me and the negative voices in the head have subsided. Instead I hear their supportive words of encouragement. I think art educators are among the most supportive and kind people that I have ever encountered, seeking to really teach and to bring out the best in their students. We can all emulate their approaches to teaching, regardless of the subject matter.
Art is a way to understanding. We’re not including art for art’s sake, which is itself important. We including the use of the arts as a critical mechanism in teaching for understanding, something that struggling learners have not had the opportunity to experience. Teach for Understanding. Help them to trust themselves, and to just start.
“Three things that come not back, the spoken word, the sped arrow and the lost opportunity.”Omar Kyham. Now we can add to that, the melted popsicles.
