Despite valiant efforts by arts education advocates over the last several decades, and real gains in arts education policy and practice, the current reality is that the visual arts education that most American children receive in schools consists primarily of tacky craft activities presented to them by classroom teachers. I actually have a great fondness for many of these activities, but that has more to do with lingering nostalgia for childhood than it does with aesthetic education.

While on a trip to Washington, D.C., I paid a visit to the offices of the U.S. Department of Education. Special structures had been built around the entrances to the building- replicas of the archetypal “Little Red Schoolhouse”. I later found out that these had been installed to protect government employees from falling masonry, but why were these particular wooden pieces of nostalgia chosen to grace the doorways to these large, gothic, stone buildings?

John Boller is a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago who works with Chicago public school teachers to support greater depth and authenticity in their mathematics teaching. He is working with the Chicago Public Schools Office of Academic Enhancement and with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) at Swift and Thorp schools through a U.S. Department of Education grant to integrate the arts with rigorous mathematics instruction.

I grieve every day over the passing of Molly Ivins, the smart, funny, sharp tongued, big-hearted political commentator. She did not suffer fools, but she sure did enjoy exposing them. I miss her clear voice in these murky political times. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and was in and out of treatment until her death in January of 2007. But she didn’t let her illness silence her. She was outspoken to the end. Here’s what she had to say in her last column: "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders.

The human creature is inherently motivated - to explore, to wonder, to at the very least seek food and shelter. The human brain is programmed to seek stimulation. Boredom is a learned behavior that fills the gap between "the mismatch of one's skill and the challenge at hand". Boredom is the invention of creativity alienated from choice. Once learned, boredom can become a "stance" of the learner (literally), an aggressive response to limited options and past disappointments.

Click the link below to see the video for the song, "Not on the Test," that Tom Chapin wrote with John Forster. The two wrote the song to express their disappointment in the lack of arts education in public schools:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dAujuqCo7s

This video was made available through Fred Klonsky's PREA Prez blog:
http://preaprez.wordpress.com/

I love Chicago. I also love New York. One of my favorite pleasures in both cities is street food – fresh mango slices dusted with chili powder, steaming hot dogs with hot peppers and slices of dill pickle on steamed poppy-seed buns, the sweet melt of coconut paletas dripping down their flat little wooden handles, raspberry Italian ice dyed bluer than anything in nature. One for my favorites, fresh chestnuts, are roasted by vendors on the streets of New York City, but alas, not on the streets of the Windy City.

Educational testing tends to be time consuming, nerve-wracking, humiliating, and boring, but above all, expensive - eating up resources that might be better used for teaching and learning. And just last week Chicago Public Schools was embroiled in a conflict over having to give newly arrived immigrants high stakes standardized tests in English, and only in English.

A number of years back, an award-winning, Broadway-produced playwright gave a talk at Victory Gardens Theater here in Chicago about the years he had spent making his living resubmitting the same script, in different forms, to a Hollywood film studio. It had quickly dawned on him that, although the studio had sought him out and commissioned this script, the film was never going to be green-lighted for production.

A classic grade school science (or is it art?) activity calls for charcoal briquettes, ammonia, salt, water, food coloring, and bluing. What is bluing? Bluing is a dye used to treat clothing that has yellowed with age and use. Here is copy from the website for Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing: