Happy Valentine's Day

In my ample free time, I have begun teaching art at St. Andrew's School. The student body is comprised mainly of Sudanese refugees, and the class to which I have been assigned (once a week only, so far - soon, the school hopes to initiate a Saturday art day to which anyone can come and participate without disrupting daily lessons) is in the 8 to 9 age range. They are learning some English, but mainly they speak with me in gestures and with exuberance. I am called both "Miss" and "teacher," both of which do the trick, although I heard that the previous art teacher was called "Miss Art" and I'd find that moniker highly entertaining.

Last week we made paper lanterns, which was a moderate success, but this week was a smash. My guest "Aisha," a professional pop-up card designer (I believe the proper title is Paper Engineer, but I'm not certain), invented a template to make pop-up Valentine's Day cards. With only two pieces of paper, some cutting and some glue, the kids can make moving cards of their very own, and color all over them as well. The project was so fun for them, they all asked for extra templates (they didn't use that term, of course) to use at home (one kid won me over with the argument that he'd already made one for his mom and now wanted another for daddy), but unfortunately I had only about 5 extra to give. The (real) teacher asked, then, that we repeat the exercise around Mother's Day - most of the kids made cards for their mother, or else for their teacher. A few even added my name on there! "I love teacher," they said.

Enough to melt my cold cold heart.

Then came picture time, which was a smidge chaotic what with the running and pushing and jumping and screaming. I rather like the action shots, though they won't work for next week's project: making frames for a class portrait (I'll print out copies of the one I decide is best, probably the one at the top of this entry).






I think I was assigned to this class randomly by the lovely British lady in charge, mainly because it fit my schedule. So whenever I walk through the other classrooms and am asked: "Why don't we have art?" (which is every time) I can only shrug. There isn't enough funding for real art teachers (or real classrooms) and this volunteer has to go home and read ten million pages before writing various brilliant papers, learning this pesky Arabic language, and sleeping occasionally.

Teaching art to kids is certainly more fun than homework. But when I'm at home reading, I can take my shoes off. There's pluses and minuses to everything.