interesting art teacher blog

This is not really dance or dance ed, but... In my (now) regular job (the art prep position I took when my dance program closed, to avoid going back to teaching middle school PE), I have just become what is referred to as an "art on a cart" teacher. Last year I had walked into an ideal situation for a newbie art teacher: the retiring art teacher was still frequently at school and available for advice, and I inherited a fabulously well-stocked and well-organized art room — pretty much the equivalent of the "dance teacher heaven " dance studio I had at EOSA. Well, fast-forward to this year, when the district closed five schools, one of them very close to mine, and my school had to add both a kindergarten and a third grade — and naturally that lovely art room was the only space left available for that new third grade. So I just spent two days in the week before staff development clearing all of those well-organized art materials out of the art room and trying to organize them in my new home base, a corner of the copy room…

In the course of that, I realized that almost all of the art teacher blogs that I have so come to depend on for lesson and project ideas are written by teachers with their own art rooms — and that I would need to find some written by art-on-a-cart teachers who know how to simplify, and might have lessons that I can realistically deal with from my copy-room base. So I googled "art on a cart" + blog to see what I might find...

… So anyway, this is a long way of explaining why I added a link to a blog that isn't strictly about dance education — one of the blogs I found is called Art Teachers Hate Glitter, and the reason I am writing about it here is that so much of what she writes about is stuff that we dance teachers can so relate to! She writes about how hard it is finding a job as arts programs get cut, the foibles of her K - 6th grade students, and especially fighting the perception that art teachers are not "real" teachers...

One post called "Crafts are for summer camp. I teach art" is about that misunderstanding and lack of respect: "Art, what I teach, what I went to school for six years to become highly qualified to teach, is about teaching kids how to create, how to paint, how to draw, how to look at the things around them, solve problems through experimentation, investigation and problem solving..." One thing that struck me was how much her description of teaching art also describes my emphases in teaching dance (problem solving, experimentation aka exploration…); but the other, of course, was how often I hear similar sentiments about dance — how many times have I heard a school justify its lack of a dance program because they have a "dance team"? (do they actually not understand the difference?)

Anyway — I know it's not as if anyone out there has oodles of extra time to spare… but if you want to find a kindred spirit in a different art form (who happens to be hilarious to boot), I highly recommend this one!