Hidden Intellectualism By Gerald Graff

1330 Words6 Pages

The Art in Education
In first grade we had to draw a picture of what we would be doing 20 years from then. We had to draw what job we would have, what our hair would look like, what we would be wearing, and I chose to draw a picture of me drawing a picture. As a first grader I knew that my future would mirror what I was doing in that exact moment; I would still have curly hair, and I would still be an artist. Loudly proclaiming that I was going to be an artist when I grew up was ok in elementary school, but at the end of middle school it was often challenged with “but what are you really going to be?” The simple thought that I really couldn’t want to just be an artist confused me more than it embarrassed me, but it embarrassed me enough to …show more content…

They’re not taken seriously or listened to because they’re not academically educated. Street smarts is overlooked by teachers and undervalued by parents. Graff’s argument is that these street-smart kids are just as valuable as those who are academically gifted because within the “street-smarts” can be found “book-smarts”. There are different types of intelligence but they are not unequal in importance. I strongly agree with Graffs argument since I can relate on a personal level. Wanting to study art guaranteed me hearing variations of Graff’s statement labeling a kid as a “lost cause” throughout the …show more content…

When I was young I wasn’t necessarily interested in art, but what I was truly interested in was color. The way color was associated with an emotion: yellow is happy, blue is sad, red is angry. I wanted to know why these colors felt these things. I would paint over my dull uniform to try and feel the same thing the color felt, and would be sent to the office all covered in paint for disrupting the class or mocking the assignment. When you’re young no one listens. At least no one listened to me. My teachers saw my lack of interest in pre-algebra to be a sign of disinterest in school as a whole. Parent-teacher conferences, taking away recess, and not even detention could fix the laziness inside of me for things like pre-algebra. All they saw was lost potential; to them I was a bright little girl with no motivation. But little did they know that I would be studying neuropsychology and doing research to develop a new form of art therapy in a few short

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