I'm Stumped.

This week, I've been building stumps. Since my backyard looks like the landscape has been clear cut, I thought it might be fun to enhance that appearance. These are built hollow, and then they are decorated with a cornucopia of leaves and flowers. Heading out to the clay shed to build another, smaller one.

 

Destruction is Vandalism

 

One of the most hurtful things that humans can do, is to purposely destroy artwork. I recently received a text from a friend, explaining that all of the student tiles on the outside of my former classroom were thrown into a dumpster. Also, all of the many nests that I had made to decorate the outside of the classroom received the same treatment. Why? I'm sure that the students might have wanted their tiles back. Some students were kind of mad that I had commandeered their work to decorate the school. My classroom had peeling paint and a broken ramp. It was always coated with brown dust, and never cleaned. Frankly, I was just trying to distract from the shabbiness. I painted two wall murals in the school library. One was completely painted over by a teacher, only a few months after completion. What makes people disrespect art, and effort? Is it motivated by thoughtlessness, or jealousy?

At my old school, I created several projects with students. Two of these projects were destroyed, or damaged by the same teacher. This seemed personal. It was a teacher who actively did not like me, so she had no problem ruining student work, because I was part of the project. The students had nothing to do with it, the affront was directed squarely at me. I remember when several students and I watched the teacher taping big sheets of paper over our mural. A third grade student yelled, "That's going to rip the paint off of our mural." It did rip large chunks of paint off of the wall. The other students with her were shocked, and angry at the disrespect. I felt terrible that they learned such a hard lesson.  At that same school, there were colleagues who appreciated the efforts of my class to make things look nicer. My class also planted a garden on a patch of weedy soil near the playground. And, even when the playground received new blacktop, the construction crew carefully shielded, and preserved the garden. 

At my most recent school, the reasoning is more complex. The destruction seems to be done in ignorance. If you have never created a large scale art project, you probably can't have much empathy. And, if you think that art isn't important, then you treat it as unimportant. My boss kept asking me to repaint murals in the new library. She asked me four times. There was no understanding that I didn't want to spend my money or my weekend free time doing the murals AGAIN. There was zero understanding of the disrespect.  

I am glad that I won't have to hear about the tiles being destroyed, since I will be teaching at a different school. There will be anger, especially if any of the students witnessed the destruction. And, it's a special kind of smoldering anger. It clings, and it becomes bitterness.

There is so much that kids learn when working on a large scale project. It also builds community. At my first school, we received a tree for each classroom because the Winter Olympics was being held in our city. Each class sent a representative to select a tree, and then volunteers drove the trees to the school. Each classroom was able to dig a hole, and plant their tree, as a team. The trees were quickly vandalized, not even lasting a week. I was crushed. I was a first-year teacher, and I was in charge of the entire tree enterprise. I took our broken sixth grade tree back to the classroom, and tried to replant it in a pot. We hand watered it, but in the end, the tree died. In the class mailbox, a student wrote me a note, thanking me for trying to salvage the tree. I'm hoping that we learned a lesson about the value of nice things, and what trees can bring to a hot, shadeless campus. We learned about disappointment, and how to not give in to it.

After 27 years in the classroom, I guess that I never have learned the lesson about big school projects. I am always hopeful, so I keep getting set up for the sadness that is vandalism. Why? Big school projects teach students how to care, and how to give of their creativity. These projects create pride, and love. Removing or destroying them creates the exact opposite.