And
up at 5.55am and out of the door by 6.15 and down the highway to school in the
cold cold COLD!, for parent/teacher conferences!
And
a lot of smiling and saying warm and interesting things about your students,
which parents love to hear. Three
mothers told me that I had made their days, because although their children struggle with
“ordinary lessons”, I report that they are creative and cheerful and
enthusiastic and full of life and ideas, all of which augur well in an Art
room. One parent was absolutely shocked
to learn that his child focuses intently on each art project and works
diligently until its completion!
And
many of the parents who come to see me are of course those who love Art
themselves, those who know that there needs to be a balance between the various
subjects taken by one child, that Art, Music and Theatre are just as necessary
as Math, Biology and Social Studies.
I
am so glad that my school values the Arts so highly. I read this interesting fact about the history of art education in American public schools: ‘The study of art appreciation in
America began with the Picture Study Movement in the late 19th century and
began to fade at the end of the 1920s. Picture study was an important part of
the art education curriculum. Attention to the aesthetics in classrooms led to
public interest in beautifying the school, home, and community, which was known
as “Art in Daily Living”’. –wikipedia. What an amazing idea! I want to know why it faded. And carried on fading a century later …. Since
2010, 25% of American public schools have dropped their Arts programmes
altogether.
I
am consistently contented with my job. I
love to teach children new skills, enjoy training their wonderful brains to
really look at things, to see more deeply.
I appreciate guiding their research, exploring the role of the artist in
society. I love to argue with them, or
listen to them, considering every subject under the sun. I want them to know better how to live in the
world, how to make sense of it through artistic expression. This type of education animates
self-awareness and with this comes a growing awareness of others, which is the
beginning of empathy, the glue of a society.
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| War and Peace - group project inspired by a study of Picasso's Guernica |
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| Place |
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| The promise of spring |
When
I was fifteen the SS Wafra, an oil tanker travelling with a full cargo of crude
oil from Saudi Arabia to Cape Town, ran aground at Cape Agulhas (which happens
to be the geographical southernmost tip of the African continent). Most of the tanks were punctured on the rocks
and at the time it was the worst oil spill in history. Of course there were millions of marine
animals affected by this spill (which is a truly pathetic word to describe what
happens when crude oil spreads out over a wide area, kills everything and
affects so much for decades!).
(The SS Wafra was eventually towed way out to sea to be sunk. A Buccaneer tried to bomb it, unsuccessfully, until a Shackleton was brought in to do the job, a fact which my sister will definitely enjoy immensely, it being her favourite aeroplane.)
One
such little animal was deeply affected but there were things which could be done to try to fix them, these quaint little
characters, the African penguins. These small creatures used to be called
Jackass penguins, because of the sound that they make, but their name has been
changed to the more polite African penguin, which also goes to show that this
is where they live. They should really
be called the Southern African penguin, because they actually only live on a
few islands off the coast of Southern Africa, with a couple of mainland
populations having been established in the 80’s.
In
the newspapers and on the radio (tv was still banned in South Africa at that
time, Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, having compared it to the atomic
bomb and poison gas in terms of its danger to the population), a call went out
for volunteers to help bathe and feed these incapacitated flightless sea-birds.
I volunteered at the Southern African
Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) (where is the F in
that acronym? In fact quite a few words are in the wrong order!) in Sea Point or
Camps Bay, I can’t remember quite where it was, although now their headquarters
are at Rietvlei Wetlands, which didn’t even exist at that time. My dad used to drop me off there in the
mornings every weekend, and pick me up in the evenings. All day we would take turns bathing the
oil-soaked birds in a special type of detergent, which had to happen many times,
over many days, so that the birds didn’t go into toxic shock. Eventually, numerous washes later, the feathers and skin would be free of the bad oil and the
penguins could preen themselves with their own good oil and in this way many
were rehabilitated and released.
After
the poor things had lost all their dignity being scrubbed, we would have to force-feed
them because penguins don’t eat dead fish.
This was the hardest part. The
penguins all stood around looking desolate after their baths, like helpless little old ladies,
turning about this way and that in an aimless confused way, holding their little arms out stiffly. To feed one you first had to reach in and
pick up the sad figure, settle yourself down and wedge it between your legs,
where the strong ones would fight violently. Once you had it more or less under control, you would then grab the beak, force it open, somehow keep holding it open with one hand, seize a slippery silver fish and shove it halfway down the bird's
gullet. Once you had done this the
penguin generally swallowed, and after a few more fish, you set it down again
with its fellows, where it shook itself a few times in a half-embarrassed, half-irritated way, and then went back to
looking terribly sorry for itself just like all the others.
These
penguins were the guinea-pigs (yes, I know that sounds silly) for
rehabilitation, as quite a number of them died in the process, little being
known at that time about what constituted a good programme to successfully
clean oil-soaked birds. It is a tragic fact that organisations like SANCCOB have had too much practice dealing with increasingly common oil spills and have therefore come up with ever better cleaning methods. It is heartbreaking that there has been the need, and
will always be a need, for such work.
Four years ago almost to the day, when I was writing my other year’s
blog, the worst “spill” happened in the Gulf of Mexico. And yet, and yet, we maintain all the usual
ways of doing things, it is not if another disaster happens, but when. Mankind is pretty stupid when greed and
global corporations are involved.
My
first-friend Trish put up a post about knitting little coats for penguins being
rehabilitated in Australia, which is an ongoing process, just as it is in South
Africa. So I have resolved to knit one little
jacket a month.
http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2014/03/05/3957423.htm#.UxfkKvmfH-8.facebook
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| Penguin doing interpretive dance as a teapot in a tea-cosy. |
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