disapproving kitty

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Zoetropes and Other Fanciful Things

I spent the better part of a Saturday at a professional development seminar about strategies for teaching gifted children. (Do I know how to live, or what?)

During one section, the leaders were talking about how we need to expose students to topics, ideas, culture, art, anything they have likely never seen before. They showed us a terrific short video of a zoetrope at Disney, featuring characters from Toy Story.

Everyone at my table perked up because we used to teach optical illusions, and our students loved it. So many teachers and administrators, though, would see what we did, and look at how hard the kids had worked, but they wouldn't get it. The most common response to nearly everything we did was "It must be nice to only get to teach the fun stuff. I have to teach the standards."

Zoetropes are just "fun stuff." That's not "real" learning. "Real" learning is diagrams and labels, worksheets, tests, and practicing their facts. It is reading and taking notes, class discussions, and making the map, the booklet, the letter to the editor, the approved project. Real teaching is what is in the standards.

The leaders asked what we thought about showing kids this zoetrope. I replied with something much shorter than this, but it's what I meant:

When a lot of teachers (and administrators) see this, they think "that's a neat magic trick." Or they may consider it cool art, but that's it. There's no other "real" educational value to it, and we shouldn't waste time on that in school. It's "play" and it's "trivial." It's not meaningful work.

That isn't true at all.

The zoetrope connects to science of the brain, and understanding how our eyes and brain work together to create the illusion of movement. It's complex and rich and requires some fairly sophisticated thinking to understand. 

The zoetrope IS a form of art. Art is not trivial. I'll say that again: Art. Is. Not. Trivial. It is connected to all elements of society. There is precision in a zoetrope, perseverance, and great attention to small details. This particular zoetrope takes two dimensional art into three dimensions which connects to the math of shapes and figures. Zoetropes have been created in all kinds of media, from stick figures on paper to Tim Burton characters out of cake. Exploring how one subject crosses in unexpected ways with other subjects requires understandings of both. And even if it were not all those things, Art still would not be trivial. 

Zoetropes are a wonderful lesson in change over time, which is in nearly every grade level's social studies standards. The earliest zoetropes began as simple two sided pictures and begat the entire motion picture industry.

Students can learn to create zoetropes which requires research, creativity, math, perseverance and precision. Each of these skills is absolutely a part of our curriculum at every grade level. If we are not teaching those skills then we are doing something wrong. 

Finally, the zoetrope, or any other "weird" thing we might expose students to can capture the imagination of a child and inspire her to study, to create, to invent, or to find her own connections. For some kids, that weird thing is going to be the ONLY thing that lights a fire beneath them. To trivialize and dismiss content that does that for a child just because is it not what is on "the test" is a crime against our students. It is antithetical to the very notion of real education.

Teach the unusual. Expose students to a vast variety of ideas even when you don't know exactly where the connections will be. They will surface. You will find them. The students will create* them for you. 

And best of all, they will remember it.

And isn't that the point?

*The next slide was a picture of a simple zoetrope. A student had gone home, researched zoetropes, made one and brought it into school. On her own. Not an assignment. Because she wanted to learn. That is great.