Fine Art Friday

Thinking of illustrators like M. C. Escher, Wayne Anderson, and Daniel Merriam always makes me think of H. R. Giger. Giger is most famous for his design of the evil extra-terrestrial and its' environs in the Alien films.
Note: please follow links with caution, as some of his artwork contains graphics of a violent or sexual nature.

Tyger

Labyrinth

Here is a clip from Labyrinth in the Escher set.

Fine Art Friday

Continuing with the theme of illustrators. One of my students asked me about M. C. Escher the other day. Most people don't know that his images are not actually drawings, but lithographs, mezzotints, linocuts, woodcuts and etchings. You'll find more info, including film clips of interviews and Escher at work, at this website. One of my favorites inspired the set design in the 1986 film Labryinth:

Fine Art Friday

I forgot to post one last week, so I'll post two today. Both are fantasty illustrators. Daniel Merriam:


And the second is an illustrator that I have admired since I was a small child and owned the book Ratsmagic. Wayne Anderson's images have stayed with me for good reason:

more on racism and segregation

A friend of mine just posted the following to her blog. I am reposting the whole thing with her permission but without credit as she wishes to remain anonymous. I pretty much agree with her analysis completely, even at the high school level in the same district. My school is primarily students of color, but even the few white kids are almost entirely from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds. Her examples could be mine, just change the grade levels, and not even that when it comes to reading levels in a few cases.

This is my fourth year in an urban school. I am one of the few white faces in the building (the others are largely other teachers...I think there are less than 20 white kids in the whole school) and this is certainly nothing new in the land of urban education. I teach in schools that have reason to worry about government takeover, AYP (annual yearly progress) and state administered tests. We are the schools they point at when they talk about a racial gap in test scores and success.

However, the longer I spend in urban schools the less comfortable I am with calling it a racial gap. If you go into a middle class/upper middle class school and look at the students of color and their grades and scores, you don't really see a gap. The same holds true of white kids in the urban schools (exceptions-gifted and talented program-usually all white kids of middle class parents who don't want to pay for private school).

The true markers of success in school have to do with income and education level of the PARENTS and really have nothing to do with race. However, the upper strata of the American Caste system is white, and while we don't like acknowledging our issues surrounding race, it seems downright un-American to talk about the class disparities.

The differences are astounding. My fifth graders are reading books I left behind in 2nd grade and that most kids would read in 3rd or early 4th. They have no interest in school as opposed to basketball. They don't care about grades. They don't do their homework more than 1/2 the time. And talking to the parents changes exactly...none...of these issues.

The parents range from girls my age-sometimes a bit younger (with ten year olds) to moms maybe 6 years older than me (and a good 5 years younger than I'll be when I have a fifth grader) who have between 1 and six kids total. The younger the mom, the more kids she seems to have. Sometimes they've gotten through college--but work so many hours that they don't feel as though it's their problem how their kid is doing. They have no discipline at home and no routines (my students mostly go to bed whenever they want-usually after I've gone to sleep).

By contrast, the parents in suburban districts are older, more educated, and more routines focused. They read to their kids, talk to them at dinner about more than tv, and generally try to expand their horizons further than the playground.

Race? It's a nice excuse, but the real issue at hand is class, age, and education level of the parents.

Mentor

My school district took 3 years to find a mentor for me. Though it took a while, I did end up with a good one. Al taught art at the high school in my district for 30 years, then worked at a local elementary school for a few years before retiring a couple of years ago. He has been nothing but supportive of me in the short time that I have known him. He drives more than an hour to come watch me teach and give me advice. Mentoring doesn't pay well enough that he'd do it for the money alone. I'm very lucky to know him.

Today I found out that he has been in the hospital since Sunday, and they don't know what's wrong with him. I'm worried because he was having an asthma attack when he observed me on Friday. I know how scary it is to feel like you can't breathe. I hope they diagnose him quickly, treat him well, and send him home soon.