My Made-up Curriculum

This week was my last week working in schools before the Christmas holidays...then my job will be making a life sized elephant for a protest. I love being an artist.

This week in school has been interesting. I'm more used to secondary school aged children I've forgotten how much little children don't know. They really don't know anything, there's no way they could function on their own without help, we should really come up with some kind of system by which they can learn all the things they need to know in life. Sometimes I forget that they have to learn stuff in stages and I can't just talk about art at university level to them, although I have tried.

I'm not into the whole 'lets talk to children in a different voice than our normal voice' thing. Do teacher's actually know they're doing that? I find it amusing when I walk into a classroom and teacher is talking in this very sing-songy patronizing way, and then I have a little bet with myself about whether they have a normal voice that they use for adults or not. So far I've only met one teacher who has no adult setting on their voice box. it creeps me out talking to them, I feel like I'm in trouble all the time.

My method is to just talk normally but try and change my vocabulary a little bit so they can understand, as I don't generally use long words this is an easy task for me. The curriculum for art is very vague I figured I can teach what I like, I do the usual school stuff like Picasso and Monet ect but I like to throw in the odd Mentally ill Japanese instillation artist or contemporary political Palestinian artist into the mix. My students may not know how to colour neaty in the lines but they are at least very socially and politically aware, which is what you need if you're going to be an artist. You don't go to see the turner prize to see very neat colouring in do you? It was yesterday when I used the phrase 'born in exile' when I realised I had gone to far. 'what's exile?' what's a refugee?' 'why are they refugees?' 'when did the artist make a Islamic prayer mat from a bed of nails?' I realised in that moment that you can explain why an artist would make a Islamic prayer mat from a bed of nails, to people who still believed in Santa.