Teaching Tennessee History: Lesson Plans for the Classroom Volume IX

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• mémoire - matière potentielle : happenings
• exposé
• leçon - matière potentielle : strategies
• leçon - matière potentielle : carawan
• cours - matière potentielle : time
• expression écrite - matière potentielle : by people
• cours - matière potentielle : on nonviolent resistance
• cours - matière potentielle : plans
• cours - matière potentielle : plan titles
• exposé - matière potentielle : method
• cours magistral - matière potentielle : by experts

Teaching Tennessee History: Lesson Plans for the Classroom Volume IX Developed by participants of the 2008 Teachers History Institute “Freedom Spirit: Tennessee and the Civil Rights Movement” This project was funded in part by a grant from Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities with additional support from Mrs. B.W. Grimes

• experiences at historical organizations
• play of the lunch counter
• historical society facilitators
• curriculum correlations
• issues of racial segregation
• copies of the play
• segregation issues
• segregation
• history

Sujets

• Exposé
• Stratégies

Informations

• Publié par: orzi
• Nombre de lectures: 22
• Langue: English

Extrait

AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION
SYBIL MARSHALL

1
As Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step; but it
is an unfortunate traveller who discovers after the first two hundred miles or
so that he has been going in the wrong direction.
My journey into the world of art in general, and into children's art in
particular, began in that way. If I heard the word 'art' at all in my childhood,
it had no connection in my mind with the lesson called 'drawing' on the
school timetable. Sometimes on a Sunday evening, as we walked in family
groups to chapel, my father would stop to admire a field more than usually
well 'stocked', or a cluster of newly thatched cornstacks, or potato stretches
straight as ribbing on a piece of knitting, and remark 'Ah. That's h'art, that
is'.
Or again, in October, we would be taking the same walk in the early evening
as the sun began to set. Then the blue and white pudding-basin under which
we walked would turn suddenly into the gayest of rainbow-coloured
sunshades, with even its most easterly rim made of pink chiffon. The black,
gold and green checks of the flat fen land tablecloth would be divided by
stripes of pale yellow or gleaming orange, where ever dykes and drains
threw back the colour to the sky. There was only one spot in the whole scene
where the rim of the sky could not actually be seen to rest upon the earth,
and that was due west, where a mile-long row of poplar trees cut off the
horizon from view, and it was exactly there that the sun would finally plunge
out of sight. Then my mother would gaze and gaze at the fret-work of tall
black trees against the crimson sky and say, 'Somebody ought to paint that'.
Somebody ought, indeed; but there have been few painters who could do
justice to a fenland sunset in October. A Turner, a Constable and a Matthew
Smith rolled into one, born and bred in the fens, might perhaps have
attempted it; but I doubt if even he would have succeeded in capturing more
than a reflected reflection of that glory. The Thursday afternoon drawing lessons, however, had nothing to do with
all this. Every Thursday, after we had sung 'Be present at our table, Lord',
our teacher said, 'Eyes open. Hands down. Don't forget to bring something to
draw.'
I lived only a hundred yards from the school, and the dinner-time of an hour
and a half was long enough for food and for play in the farmyard as well.
When, at 1.25 p.m., my face had been hastily wiped and my jumper divested
of loose straws and 'sweethearts', I would remember the 'something to draw'.
On each side of the garden path, just inside our front gate, a laurel bush
grew. On Thursday after Thursday after Thursday, I clawed a-spray of
leaves from one or the other of them, and as the bell began to ring I ran
towards school pulling off the leathery leaves and dropping them behind me
like Hansel and Gretel's peas, till I stood panting in 'the line', clutching in my
hand a long, pale green stalk, at the top of which still remained two forlorn
but symmetrically opposite lateral leaves. Sometimes I yielded to tearful
entreaties of 'Give us a leaf,' and arrived at my desk in class with only one.
Then out from a cupboard came our drawing books, white cartridge paper in
green covers, about 11 by 7 inches, our H.B. pencils sharpened to a needle
point, and an India-rubber. In my heavy, hot, tensed hand, the pencil became
a graving tool, scoring deep through many pages. No rubber could ever erase
the marks it left on the top page. A wetted finger sometimes helped, and
even a tear or two came in useful, until the resistance of the paper at last
gave way, and a hole appeared in the sketched leaf which Nature had
neglected to arrange in the original. As the sketch was usually no more than
a quarter of the natural size, the hole sometimes accounted for most of the
drawing, and there was very little left to show if teacher wanted to see it.
Sometimes the routine varied and we were given the tea-pot, the coal scuttle,
the hand bell or a pair of tongs to draw. On those days I suffered acutely, for
I had not then the experience of previous Thursdays to rely upon to help me
through.
Our teacher was in no way to blame for the conditions I have described. She
was an excellent teacher, who taught me things of much greater value than
ever could be found in a text-book. It was from her I first learned that one
cannot justify one's existence in a small community if one is not prepared to
be of it. She also made me understand that from those to whom much is
given, much is expected; and that most doors will open to those who have courage to knock. She did no worse than her colleagues in the matter of 'art',
either. If anything, she did better, for she seemed to sense the need for
something different, even while following the usual routine, and without
knowing at all where to begin to break it. When 'the New Art' was beginning
to be heard of even in districts as remote as ours, she at least gave it a trial
with the means immediately at her disposal. I remember the occasion well.
We were told one day to divide our drawing page into four, using a ruler.
Having done so, we put down our pencils and folded our arms while teacher
explained that today we were to tell a story in four pictures, one in each
rectangle on the page we had just prepared. I had been brought up on the
books and illustrations of Louis Wain, and my imaginative world had always
been peopled with cats. I seized my pencil and began, while scene after
scene of my story flashed upon the screen of my imagination. My four
pictures told the story of a family of cats, complete with portmanteaux,
making a journey by train from our local station to Yarmouth, where
herrings hung in rows to welcome them.
I do not suppose for one moment that anyone other than I could possibly
have recognised the creatures I drew, nor have interpreted their story; but in
my mind's eye they still make their smoky journey to their fishy destination
as clearly as the day I drew them, and neither the many, many pictures I
have since drawn, nor the hundreds of children's pictures I have since
studied, have ever succeeded in rubbing them from my memory.
I must have been about ten years old at the time of the episode of the cats,
and almost immediately after it, I left the school to attend the local grammar
school. My new school had less than a hundred pupils, mixed, and a staff of
five teachers including the headmaster. The pupils were mixed in more ways
than in sex. They ranged from eight to eighteen, from fee-paying pupils who
could barely read a primer on admittance, to 'scholarship' boys whose
brilliance deserved the university career which the headmaster held up
before us as the nearest thing to heaven we could ever hope to attain on
earth. Towards the celestial cities of Oxford and Cambridge some very few
of us actually set our faces, though with far greater hindrances in our paths
than ever Christian encountered, and with far less hope and faith to sustain
us, for it was pitifully obvious how few ever got there. During the eight
years I was at the school, only one of my fellows ever reached the dizzy
heights of a degree, leaving Oxford as a 13.A. and a Mus.B., only to throw
up scholarship to join the R.A.F. and be one of the first pilots killed in the
Second World War. Here, no more than in the primary school, should our failures be allowed to
shadow the magnificence of that staff of five devoted teachers. The
headmaster himself was a man able and willing to teach anything and
everything with equal success. He was an Oxford man, an M.A., an M.Sc.,
and an A.I.C. In those days before degrees became ten a penny, we felt we
could be proud of him. He collected more addenda to his name as his life
went on Q.P., etc.), and a story once went the rounds of the school that an
impertinent ex-pupil had addressed a letter-to him as F.T.A. Esq., A to Z. He
was the one man I ever knew who really held science and art to be of equal
importance to life. To him education was a process which stopped only
when the heart stopped, and the body rested for ever. Your true education
will start only on the day you leave school he would tell us. You have
simply been coming here to learn how to learn.
He and the other four taught us everything from Latin to Agricultural
Science, from Needlework to Applied Mathematics, and 'drawing', of
course, now called 'Art' on the timetable. The laurel leaves had given way to
endless permutations of a cube, a cylinder, a pyramid and a sphere, all made
of wood and painted white. To the mysteries of 'shading' I was not initiated;
it was taken for granted that I knew all about it. At the end of each term an
examination revealed my artistic ability to be worth no more than 10 per
cent marks.
Then one of the masters died suddenly. His successor, straight from one of
the northern universities, was, I feel sure, and appalled to find that art was
his pidgin no less than the geography he had specially undertaken. We also
were appalled, for the accustomed pyramids and spheres now