The Arts and kids
I’ve had the opportunity over the last few months to work with youths in the arts, specifically in the writing of poetry. I really had no idea what to expect: would they enjoy it? Hate it? Think we’re boring? To my surprise, they loved it. Even if they didn’t complete the tasks exactly how I’d envisioned them (for example, haikus were premdominantly three paragraphs instead of three lines), I think that the children really do benefit from having a creative outlet and being asked to think outside of the traditional math and sciences mindframe.
My first experience with poetry came in elementary school as a one-off exercise–just write a poem. It was in my language arts class, I believe, and it was an exercise that I simply did not do. Who writes poems? Pffftttt was part of my response, while my other response was How the heck do I do that? And soon after my non-completion of the exercise, the writing of poetry in my life slipped into oblivion until my second year of college. Literally, throughout my 12 years of pre-college education, I was asked to write poetry once. And hated it. And when it came back again in college, it was something that I was ready to embrace and fully appreciate.
While this may all seem like just a rant at this point, it isn’t. I had never been asked to be creative in a way that I could use, and it’s something that I wish would have been different. We never know in what subject a child may blossom, and the best thing that we can do is expose them to everything–including the writing of poetry and fiction–early enough, and let them choose what they enjoy enough to stick with.