Our middle school is an art school?
Christopher Fahey joined a discussion about personal digital archiving that I was part of on Twitter this morning. (Yes, you’ve read that correctly, personal digital archiving.) His name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place him, so I searched for his URL in my bookmarks and found a few of his posts that date back to 2007 and added a tag with his name. Those digital artifacts even helped me illustrate a point I was making about collateral discovery (my term). But, for me, even better than that is what happened a couple of hours later as I reread one of those posts of his that I dug up. In it, Christopher used a list to explain what he learned in art school. The bulleted points reminded me of what we aim for in the middle school program that we’ve been building over the past few years, the one that I’ve written about (not all links within are on topic) from time to time.
So, here I’ve made a few minor, but necessary edits to the list so it fits middle school. Note that we regularly use the term colleagues to describe what others would probably refer to as students and teachers.
- How to champion and defend my ideas.
- How to distinguish between a personal critique and a critique of work.
- How to respectfully and constructively critique my peers. How to attack the ideas of my colleagues and still have fun with them later.
- How to test drive many different ideas through sketching, cobbling, and envisioning them, before finally settling on which one to go ahead and build.
- How to tell when I am done with a project that could just as easily be improved endlessly.
- How to tell when an idea that is precious to me is actually holding me back. And then to feel good about throwing it away.
- How to have the confidence to present my ideas in public without fear.
- How to distinguish between taste, technical skill, and empirical efficiency.
- How to detect bullshit, and to avoid generating it myself.
- How to go the extra mile to make something high-quality.
- How to recognize talent in my peers.
- How to collaborate with my colleagues effectively to reach a common goal.
- How to be deeply competitive without being a jerk. [We emphasize competition with oneself and one’s past work.]
- How to make something new just for the sake of being new.
- How to build off of, and give credit to, the ideas of my predecessors both contemporary and in history.
- How to save ideas that I’m not ready for and keep them for future use.
- How to start all over again from the beginning.
- How to teach all of the above.
We don’t fully master all of the items, but if upon graduation, our middle schoolers can honestly make most of the above statements about themselves (I think they can.), we can all be proud of the program and what we have accomplished. If that makes our middle school an art school, then I would love for many more middle schools to be art schools.
