Trying to teach art at a dysfunctional public grade school

“If I didn’t care about my kids, I’d have an easier time.”

“No real-life problem is ever actually solved, it seems.”

For three years, Geri Anderson has worked as a grade school art teacher. She wakes up every day, willing to try her hardest to make a difference in the lives of the students who attend Walnut Elementary School.  “Geri” and “Walnut” are not real names; Geri and I decided to use these pseudonyms to allow Geri to speak freely. Everything else in this article is based on my recent interview of Geri. 

Geri is a soft-spoken woman in her mid-twenties.  Before being hired for her current job, Geri often substitute taught at expensive private grade schools.  She took her first permanent job at Walnut to make a difference. 

Geri teaches art to each of the 200 students who attend Walnut.  They range in age from preschoolers to sixth-graders. The average class includes about twenty children, although some of the classes have almost 30 children.  Not all of the teacher positions are filled at Walnut; for many months, the school has sought the help of adults from the community to fill in for the non-existent science teacher, for example. 

Walnut is located in the urban center of a large U.S. city.  98% of the children attending Walnut Elementary are African-American.  More than 90% of these students receive free or reduced price lunches.  Based upon Geri’s observations, the great majority of the students live in single-parent homes.  Classroom behavior issues, including …

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Why can’t I get that song out of my head?

I might owe some people an apology.  

I recently posted about a song from “Scrubs the Musical,” a television episode that aired a few weeks ago.  The title of this tune is presumably “Everything comes Down to Poo.”  It is a clever and funny tune, but it is also dangerous.

For me (hopefully not for you) that song morphed into an “earworm,” another name for a song that can get stuck in one’s head.  This crazy tune from Scrubs has been following me around relentlessly for the past two weeks.  It has sometimes been distractingly annoying during the day.  It even kept me awake one night last week.

What to do?  I just happen to be reading a cogsci/music book: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. Here’s what I learned from Levitin: There is relatively little scientific work done on the topic of earworms.  What is clear is that

musicians are more likely to have ear worm attacks than non-musicians, and . . . people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms—in some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects.

Hmmm . . . This makes me wonder whether Walgreens carries any over-the-counter medications for OCD . . .

Levitin suggests that the neural circuits representing a song somehow get stuck in “playback” mode, but usually only a small fragment of a song (15 to 30 seconds) is involved.  Ear worms are most likely “simple songs and commercial jingles.”…

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The effect of media images of sexed-up girls and women posing as adolescents

According to a recent report by the American Psychological Association,

Inescapable media images of sexed-up girls and women posing as adolescents can cause psychological and even physical harm to adolescents and young women.
According to this APA report, the pressure of this "sexualization" can lead to depression, eating disorders, and poor academic performance. See, also, Yahoo's article on this report. What are the sources of these images? The report points to these examples:
Advertisements (e.g., the Skechers “naughty and nice” ad that featured Christina Aguilera dressed as a schoolgirl in pigtails, with her shirt unbuttoned, licking a lollipop), dolls (e.g., Bratz dolls dressed in sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and feather boas), clothing (thongs sized for 7– to 10-year-olds, some printed with slogans such as “wink wink”), and television programs (e.g., a televised fashion show in which adult models in lingerie were presented as young girls).
It is difficult to not notice this modern smearing of the boundaries between female childhood and adulthood. Our media is obsessed with presenting images of women acting like little girls and little girls forced to act "sexualized." What's the difference between "sexualization" and healthy sexuality? According to the APA report, "sexualization" occurs when
a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;

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Stop Writing?

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those…

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