The sound of an alarm clock is the first sign that summer is over. No more sleeping in and lazily traipsing around the house until 10 or 11 when I finally decide to get dressed and go to a cafe, visit a museum or get on a bus to another part of town. Watching the overcast morning transform into a sun drenched day from the living room window while drinking morning tea is definitely a luxury of summer. Waking up when it is still dark through the cracks of the bedroom blinds, six o'clock showers and finding something to wear are not part of the process that defines the summer lifestyle.
This past week I attended a Marin County Foundation Arts training, now in its third year, requiring several teachers at Hall and Neil Cummins to wake up, get dressed and attend training classes that incorporated art, theater, dance and music into hands on activities that we all could take back into the classroom. Overall, these trainings are very fulfilling because we learn by doing the activities that many of us will teach when we return.
I learned how to draw and write about an orange. That may sound like a simple description, but what came from that was a way of using art and writing together that I have not experienced before, incorporating each step of the workshop process that required an artistic activity necessary to facilitate the next step in the writing process, fostering the next artistic step, and so on. In previous years I learned a lot, and incorporated a rich artistic process into assignments, and utilized theater activities to foster better appreciation for literature. The previous years loaded me as a teacher with new tools to use with writing, but often in tandem, or as a lead in to a pure writing process, never as a new synthesis of two intertwined processes, one dependent upon the other.
So, get ready to draw an orange, and write about it as well.
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