Department of Corrections

One of the biggest challenges to teaching the arts is getting students beyond the fear of “messing up”. A student draws an unintended pencil line, balls up the work, and throws it away. Ask the student what’s going on, and the answer is likely to be “I messed up”, followed by downcast eyes and the sticking out of the lower lip. The value of drafts and the usefulness of mistakes can be difficult ideas to communicate in a school culture of testable right answers. But whether our work is in science or in social studies or in language arts or in the fine arts, we will never develop judgment if we need to BE right before we THINK right. Even mathematics, which is stereotyped as a world of correct answers, is really about the clarity, specificity, and elegance of symbolic descriptions of problems.
Abstract concepts are often difficult to share with young, concrete thinkers. Playwright Reginald Lawrence, of Chicago’s Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theater, works at several Chicago public schools through the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. Part of MPAACT’s teaching methodology involves sharing with students the elements of story structure that playwrights and fiction writers use to create their work. Reggie, trying to explain the abstract nature of character motivation (such as wanting power, excitement, status, etc.) asked, “What is something you want that you can’t touch?” One precocious child tentatively put forward “An electric eel?”
It takes time to introduce learners to the joys of useful failures and experimentation. Meanwhile, there is another, more concrete strategy for responding to having “messed up”.
The eraser.
Edward Nairne, an English engineer, created the first rubber eraser in 1770. The gummy substance got its name from the “rubbing” action of erasing. Before that, white bread (without the crust) was used to erase pencil marks. But the raw rubber had some of the same limits as bread. It was perishable. In 1839, inventor Charles Goodyear discovered “vulcanization”- a process for curing rubber to make it durable, and the eraser became a common feature of any desk set.
In 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia received a patent for attaching a rubber eraser to a lead pencil. This patent was later revoked because it was determined that the pencil/eraser combo was just that- two different devices attached to each other, rather than an entirely new product.
The rubber eraser attached to pencils is typically pink, but erasers come in all colors, especially novelty erasers, that are formed into a wide variety of shapes as decorations and souvenirs. These novelty erasers don’t do much erasing.
And that’s messed up.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org