Pacing

I was talking recently to a doctor who cares for many terminal patients, and who not only has to deal with the complex shifts of thinking that the dying require to accept the ending of their lives, but also has to deal with the tangled webs of response that families have to these leave-takings.

We do what we can do for the dying, as best we can, but what we can do is not always what the dying need. All of our experience tells us that food is life, but as the body shuts down and shifts into permanent “rest” mode, it no longer desires food. We keep offering sustenance that does not sustain, hoping that “if only she eats, she will live. If only we find the right food, he will stay with us.”

Eventually, most families move beyond denying that death is inevitable, and stop insisting that their loved ones be kept going “by any means possible”. At this point, some families move into reverse gear, hoping for the end to arrive as soon as possible. “Why is death so long in coming?” We are indeed a “fast food nation”, and apparently we want an order of death to also be served up as quickly as possible. Ours is an impatient culture, that believes our desires can supersede physics. But the body knows how to die. And it takes the time that it takes.

The doctor told me another story of a patient’s impatient demands. A well-placed businessman asked whether his connections could be used to speed up the production of his blood test results. He did not seem to understand that, with even the very best of professional contacts, bacteria could not be made to grow faster for him than for anyone else.

What does this results-on-demand attitude have to do with education and the arts? School improvement initiatives are frequently expected to demonstrate all-too-dramatic impacts in all-too-short a time frame: Raise reading scores by bringing an artist to a school for six visits! Reduce teen pregnancy by offering ten dance classes!

Meanwhile, funders and policymakers are increasingly demanding substantive evidence of measurable outcomes as the pre-condition for even short-term program support, resulting in arts education organizations claiming huge impacts that are totally out of sync with the actual scale of their interventions in schools.

The doctor also described to me the challenge of dealing with the all too human tendency of families to think of THEMSELVES as the protagonists in the death narrative, as opposed to the people who are doing the actual dying. Funders and policymakers (and universities) often make a similar mistake- thinking that they, rather than teachers, are the main characters in education. Teachers are treated as if, to use a medical term, they are “obtunded” ("blunted, dulled, verbal output unintelligible or nil”), or in other words, “out of it”.

Within the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), teachers are definitely “with it”. Teachers and artists forge long term partnerships over time, collecting and analyzing evidence of their on-going impact on students as the work itself unfolds. This is how schools improve. And it takes the time that it takes.

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