I was not a bright student. At least, that's what I had been taught. I wasn't good at math or science. History bored me to death. "Literature" was dry old books that felt like history. None of these books had pictures. All of these subjects were things that I couldn't interact with. They had no relevance to me, and no practical application to the world I knew. Though I didn't absorb the concepts in the text books, I still learned that I was a bad student by the way I was treated. Even a bad student like me continued to learn with reinforced lessons that I would never achieve excellence in school. I'm not saying that I had mean teachers. They never deliberately told me this. Eventually, however, I learned the meaning behind, "It's okay, you just don't test well."
Then, in an English Literature class, I was introduced to Shakespeare. We studied a play, and through studying that play, elements of History started to make sense to me. I was able to link History to a relevant story that I was beginning to love. I was reading a book without pictures and loving every moment of it. Suddenly, I loved the Elizabethan period. I wanted to learn more, so I read more plays. I discovered classic forms of art that brought life to the human experience from different time periods. Before long, I was learning about building stage sets. Suddenly, my worst subject, Math, made sense as I was applying it to the abstract concepts of designing a set and angling lights. That led to scientific study about light and sound, how it travels, and how it interacts with matter. This bad student and slow learner was suddenly doing pretty well in school. The books without pictures had pictures I could see with my mind.
It turns out that there are a lot of kids who get labeled as bad or slow too early for them to have a chance to do much about it. It also turns out that different learning tools will activate different students in significant ways. We don't know how many kids we interact with who pick up on what we're putting down for them. They aren’t encouraged to see the pictures that weren't printed in the book. My salvation was that I found my community in the arts. I found teachers who made the arts an interactive part of my learning. This is why it's so painful for me to hear about funding being cut from art programs in schools, and why I'm an advocate for supporting community resources that offer creative platforms to the public.
I love supporting my local community theatre programs. I love them for the collaborative opportunities they afford people who are looking to exercise their creativity. It's a safe space to exercise the mind and to watch other people do extraordinary things live on stage in order to portray a story or an experience in an extraordinary way. As an artist, I find inventiveness more impressive than a big budget, and small local theaters around the world have to figure that out every day. Community artists find creative ways to work around the limits of a budget, forcing the mind to explore better, more interesting ways to imply or represent an idea, a set, and a costume. These artists accomplish marvelous things with less money than they have to spend on a grocery list, and many of them are those same students who learned too well that they were slow in school.
That's pretty good for a bad student.
