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A Gift for You: A Fabulous Production of “42nd Street”

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2019 //
3

If you love Broadway musicals as much as I do, you will love this PBS Great Performances production of the classic “42nd Street.” The show will no longer be available after November 29; after that date, you will have to pay to view it.

I have seen the original movie and I have seen the show twice on Broadway. This is the best production yet. It is a stunning use of cinematography to capture the thrill of being in the theater even if you are at home watching on TV.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/42nd-street-full-episode/10182/

 

Categories Art, Joy

Robin Lithgow: What You Need to Know about Rhetoric

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2019 //
25

Robin Lithgow spent many years in charge of arts education for the Los Angeles public schools. Having retired, she is now writing a book and blogging about the arts, especially theater and drama and their relation to cognition.

I think you will enjoy this delightful meditation about rhetoric, what it meant in Shakespeare’s day, and what it means today.

What’s with all the rhetoric?

She begins:

This is fun!

In The Taming of the Shrew, before the shrew, Kate, matches wits with Petruchio in their hilarious first encounter, the illiterate servant Grumio warns her that Petruchio will “disfigure” her with his “rope-tricks.” He’s referring to Petruchio’s scathing facility with rhetoric (which Grumio hears as rope-tricks) and his ability to use rhetorical “figures” to counter and obliterate any argument she might throw at him.

When Shakespeare was a student, only a few generations after the printing press had been invented, rhetoric had been at the core of a child’s education for over two thousand years. Before literacy was prevalent, the ability to persuade though speech gave enormous power to the “rhetor,” the public speaker. The ability to make language punch and pop, to make the listener sit up and pay attention (or else!), was considered the most important skill of a person educated in the liberal arts. All through ancient times, the middle ages, and well into the Enlightenment, the “Trivium” (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) were the foundational subjects taught first to a child in elementary, or “trivial” school.

Shakespeare had to be able to recognize and practice in his speaking and in his writing at least 132 rhetorical figures, tropes, and devices. He had to be able to practice expressive, physical rhetoric (or rhetorical dance) every time he stood on his two feet and spoke to his teachers or his classmates. “Per Quam Figuram?” was the question asked repeatedly, all day, every day: “What figure are you using?”

Categories Art, Creativity, Literature

Betsy DeVos: The Musical!

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2019 //
38

Quinn Strassel, a drama teacher at Ann Arbor Community High School has written a music about Betsy DeVos, the arch-for of America’s public schools. The Michigan media took note.

Strassel recruited Diane Hill, his former Ypsilanti High School drama teacher, to take on the role of Betsy DeVos, while he played husband Dick DeVos and brother Erik Prince.

The cast also included some of Strassel’s former students and fellow school teachers and staff.

As the fictitious storyline in the play goes, DeVos makes an appearance at a Grand Rapids charter school, “Future Business Leaders of Tomorrow Academy,” and enlists the help of six students of color in putting on a musical. She promises to personally give them $200,000 to renovate the school theater if they do a good job.

As the musical progresses, things go wrong and DeVos upsets and frightens the children. Guns enter the picture, one student is worried a family member may be deported, and another student has his brains scrambled by “Neurocleanse,” a mockery of the real-life Neurocore, a DeVos-backed, brain-performance company.

Another student complains about his family falling victim to a “pyramid scheme” run by Amway Corp., a DeVos company.

My friend Jennifer Berkshire wrote to tell me about Quinn’s terrific show.

She wrote:

The teacher who wrote the musical is amazing – his name is Quinn Strassel and he teaches drama at Ann Arbor Community High School. The part of Betsy was played by his former theater teacher at Ypsilanti High School, Diane Hill. That acclaimed theater program no longer exists, by the way, a casualty of Michigan’s schools of choice policy that has devastated schools in working class communities like Ypsilanti.

Here’s a bit about him and the show.

The writer, director, and producer Quinn Strassel wrote:

I believe comedy can be a path to change.

As a teacher, I’ve watched as Betsy DeVos has led a movement to defund and dismantle public schools in Michigan. It has been heartbreaking and devastating to witness.

I can’t outspend Betsy but I’m fighting back with what I’ve got: comedy, music, love, support from my community, and years of experience teaching and directing theatre.

I spent this past summer writing “Betsy Devos! The Musical!”

The show is completely ridiculous (with songs like “Jesus Wants Me to be Rich” and “The Best Kind of Teacher is a Teacher with a Gun”). But I’m proud of what it’s become. I think it has substance and heart.

I would like to share this show with you and as many of your friends as you can bring along for the ride. I want us to laugh and to celebrate public schools. I want to win hearts and change lives. https://www.gofundme.com/f/staged-reading-for-betsy-devos-the-musical

Please watch the link to the show, help fund it, and reach out to Quinn Strassel about staging a production in your community.

Art and humor will save us! And this show has both.

Categories Art, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Humor, Michigan, Privatization

Robin Lithgow: A Blog to Celebrate the Arts in School

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2019 //
30

Robin Lithgow was in charge of arts education for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She learned to deal with bureaucracy, frustration, and budget cuts, but she never lost her joy and passion for the arts and their power to change students’ lives.

Now in retirement, she has become a student of the history of the arts.she believes that the justification for the arts cannot be demonstrated with data. She is convinced that explorations into their history will awaken minds and draw them into sympathetic appreciation for the power of the arts.

Read this entry on “Good Behavior and Audacity” to understand where she is heading.

I am retired from the position of Director of the Arts Education Branch in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where for fourteen years I and dozens of amazing colleagues labored to bring the arts to the core of the academic day for every student at every grade level. Research supported our efforts; teachers and most administrators embraced the program enthusiastically; and the evidence poured in that students thrive in arts-rich schools….And yet, we were constantly amazed that we had to advocate, advocate, advocate, to fight each year for our modest funding and for our seat at the table with the decision makers at the head of the district.

Could it be that this was, at least in part, because of our lack of history? Education leaders keep asking us for our “data,” and the obsession for data certainly drives the political power battles in education across the country. We HAVE data, and tons of it, but it is “soft” data and cannot always be directly linked to the results being sought. Perhaps history could be more powerful than data.

So I launched my own research, and once I retired I was literally able to bask in it. Over the past six years I have written a book focusing on one brief period in history, that of the humanist education designed primarily by Desiderius Erasmus and enjoyed by the young William Shakespeare and tens of thousands of his peers in Elizabethan England.

The title of my book is Good Behavior and Audacity: Humanist Education, Playacting, and a Generation of Genius.

Categories Art, Arts Education, Creativity

My Gift to You, an Hour of Sheer Pleasure

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2019 //
19

I recently watched the PBS special about the Jewish legacy on Broadway, and I enjoyed every minute.

It is online, and I share it now with you. 

I hope it is still online.

I have always loved Broadway musicals, and many are reprised in this special.

But in addition to the entertainment and the rich cultural history, we see a very contemporary story of immigrants coming to America and becoming quintessentially American. We see Irving Berlin arriving as a five-year-old from Russia, having survived a pogrom, then becoming the composer of “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” and “White Christmas,” among the thousands of songs he wrote. We see stories in which composers used their music to teach lessons about racism, intolerance, and bigotry, like “South Pacific,” and the song “You Got to Be Taught to Hate.” Often they told the stories through the experiences of other groups, like “Porgy and Bess” and “West Side Story.”

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I am sending a gift to PBS for remaining a beacon of light in these dark times.

Categories Art, Bias, Bigotry, Creativity, Joy, Love

Ariel Sacks: Teach Whole Books or Excerpts?

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2019 //
63

 

Teacher Ariel Sacks notes two clashing trends in teaching literature:  teach whole books or excerpts.

The recent trend toward short texts seems to have come from the Common Core State Standards and accompanying standardized tests. As Peter Greene explains in a Forbes Magazine article, Common Core Testing and the Fracturing of Literature, “Both the standards and the tests are focused on ‘skills,’ with the idea that the business of reading a play or a story or any piece of text is not for the value of that text, but for the reading skills that one acquires and practices in the reading.” This limited focus on skills overlooks so much of what literature offers young people. But my issue with excerpts goes beyond the skills versus content debate, which has been going on many decades.

I question the choice to alter a novel’s form by excerpting it. This is partly on principle—the author didn’t intend for it to be read in bits. But more importantly, I believe reading excerpts puts students at a disadvantage in developing a love of reading and their skills in literary analysis.

The Whole Story Advantage

Literature is art. When we read a novel, we are reading an author’s artistic production, which was created intentionally in a specific form. The novel as a literary form asks readers to spend time living in a world and experiencing the story subjectively as it unfolds, detail by detail. Sure, the length can be prohibitive at times on a practical level; but fundamentally, the work of art begins at the beginning and ends at the end. Without the whole story, our experience is incomplete, and we really can’t know what the author is trying to convey with major gaps in our knowledge of the text.

I like to compare this to looking at a work of visual art—a painting, for example. Yes, we can study a corner of a painting, but we would almost never do so without first viewing the painting as a whole. Without seeing the whole, we miss out on the experience of the art as it was intended. And we are at a gross disadvantage in analyzing even the details we see in one corner, because we don’t know what purpose they serve in relation to the whole.

I agree with Sacks. A writer goes to great lengths to create a novel. Teaching only an excerpt does violence to the work and destroys love of literature.  Excerpting is butchery.

Categories Art, Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Real Education

An Exchange About Destroying a Significant Work of Art That Some Find Offensive

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2019 //
173

The individual with whom I had this exchange asked me to delete it. I posted it without identifying her so her views and links would get the attention they deserved. She wants it deleted so it is.

Categories Art

Is it Just or Patriotic to Paint Over Art That Offends Someone?

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2019 //
50

 

Larry Cuban posts here an opinion piece that appeared originally in the New York Times about a decision by the San Francisco School Board to paint over (and thus destroy) a Depression-Era mural that is highly critical of the U.S.

The artist Victor Arnautoff was a Russian immigrant and a Communist. His mural “Life of Washington” depicted George Washington and other Founding Fathers in a very negative light.

The 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

The School Board decided that the mural was offensive to Native American and African-American students. And they voted not to cover the mural but to paint over it so that it would be utterly destroyed and never seen again.

These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal. John M. Strain, an English teacher, told The Times’s Carol Pogash that his students “feel bad about offending people but they almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”

So the school committee voted to condemn a work of art that acknowledged and by doing so condemned “slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.”

This action by the School Board is nuts.

Categories Accountability, Art, California, San Francisco

OECD-PISA Leader: Arts Education May Be More Important for the 21st Century Than Test Scores

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2019 //
55

This is an ironic story. There is no one and no institution that has done more to set off an international test score competition than Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, which administers the periodic international tests called PISA, the Programme in International Student Assessment. Every nation wants to be first. Every nation waits anxiously to see whether its test scores in reading, mathematics, and science went up or down. In 2010, when the 2009 PISA scores were released, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was facing another “Sputnik moment,” and it was time to crack down. Others wrung their hands and wondered how we could toughen up to compete with Shanghai.

Yet Scheicher testified recently to a committee of the House of Commons that arts education may be more valuable than the academic skills that are tested.

The arts could become more important for young people than maths in the future, according to a leading education expert.

Researcher Andreas Schleicher, who leads the Programme for International Student Assessment at the intergovernmental economic organisation OECD, told a House of Commons inquiry that he believed young people could benefit more from the skills gained through creativity than test-based learning.

He was giving evidence to the Education Select Committee as part of an ongoing inquiry into the fourth industrial revolution – the influence of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence on society.

Schleicher, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading educational thinkers, said: “I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths.”

“We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite,” he said, suggesting that science and maths may become ‘softer’ in future when the need for them decreases due to technology, and the ‘hard skills’ will be “your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience”.

His comments come amid ongoing concerns about the narrowing of the education system in the UK to exclude creativity and prioritise academic subjects.

Campaigners argue that this is prohibiting many young people from pursuing creative careers. However, Schleicher said that too narrow a curriculum could also make young people less prepared for the demands of the future.

Categories Art, Creativity, Innovation, International, Testing

Boston: The “WOW” Boy Is Located

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2019 //
18

At a recorded performance of a Mozart piece at Boston Symphony Hall, a little boy said at the very conclusion, at the very moment when you could hear a pin drop, a very audible “WOW.” The audience laughed and applauded.

The Handel and Haydn Society searched and found the child. He was attending the concert with his grandfather, who said the child was on the autism spectrum and he had never seen the child react so enthusiastically.

The Handel & Haydn Society had just finished its rendition of Mozart’s ‘‘Masonic Funeral’’ at Boston’s Symphony Hall on Sunday when a youngster blurted out loudly: ‘‘WOW!’’

Boston classical music station WCRB-FM captured the exuberance on audio. The crowd can be heard bursting first into laughter and then rousing applause for the child… [The sound track: https://www.classicalwcrb.org/post/do-you-know-wow-child#stream/0%5D

“We have found the ‘wow’ child!” the group announced in a Facebook post Thursday evening.

He is a nine-year-old boy from New Hampshire. 

Music is indeed a universal language that speaks to all of us. 

 

Categories Art, Education Reform
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