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Category: doodling

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Everyone should make art

Why spend money teaching kids arts and music when we can drug them into submission?

Not only did yesterday’s painting class develop their brains, they watched an osprey family on that nest on the pole.

 As a parent, I skirmished with my kids’ school about doodling. I agreed to an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for my youngest just so they would let him doodle in class. To me it was obvious that doodling helps kids who are stressed from sitting in one place for too long.

A few years ago, I wrote about a teenager arrested for doodling. Sadly, it wasn’t the only time it happened.

I tell my students to carry a sketchbook at all times, mostly to help them improve their drawing chops. I draw whenever I’m waiting or listening. I’ve drawn through twenty years of church sermons, and I don’t think it’s damaged my ability to hear what my pastors have said.
Sadly, my kids’ school didn’t agree. Even with an IEP, drawing in class was eventually banned for my son. (The good news is, as an autonomous college student, his grades are great.)
Gwendolyn Linn taught a class within one of my painting classes. Her audience was rapt.
Science tells us that doodling-repression is flat-out wrong. A recently study at Drexel University used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) technology to measure blood flow in the so-called ‘reward pathway’ of the brain while subjects drew.
They were tested while doing three different short activities: coloring in a mandala, doodled within or around a pre-marked circle, and free drawing. All three activities caused an increase in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.
Of course, the medial prefrontal cortex is not just the ‘happy button’ that gets turned on when you do something enjoyable or misuse drugs. It’s also involved in planning, personality, decision-making and moderating social behavior. Among its more important processes is the development of a sense of self and that Holy Grail of educators, executive function.
Nancy Woogen working on her pre-frontal cortex in my Sea & Sky Workshop a few years ago.
Doodling in or around the circle had the greatest neural impact, followed by free drawing and coloring. Mostly, the differences weren’t significant. The exception was for subjects who self-identified as artists. For them, coloring inside the lines turned out to be a negative experience.
There have been many studies with similar results. Training in drawing is associated with an increase in brain gray matter and changes in the prefrontal cortex. Making art improves the functional connectivity between cortices. Even passive engagement with art helps brain function.
Studies have shown similar positive results on the brain from making and listening to music.
Still, the arts are the orphan stepchildren of our educational system. They’re the first thing cut. But why spend money teaching our kids arts and music when we can drug them into submission?
Corinne Avery rearranging dinghies at another workshop, this time at Camden harbor.
Note: I’m demoing painting today at Windjammer Days in Boothbay Harbor from 1-4 PM. My pals Ed Buonvecchio and Bobbi Heath will also be there, along with my two favorite schooners, American Eagle and Heritage. If you’re free, come see us. You may discover a whole new way of lighting up the neural pathways in your brain.
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Sit and stare

It’s a parent-led insurrection, and it’s about losing local control.
Today marks the beginning of New York State Assessment for ELA and math grades 3-8. It’s my understanding that some districts will require non-compliant students to sit for the duration of the exam and do nothing.
“Basically none of our children will be allowed to read,” parent Amanda Talma told WHEC news. “They will have to sit on every testing day, six days for 90 minutes, while their peers are taking those exams.”
The notebook doodles here are by my son, Dwight Perot. Some years, he paid dearly for doodling, but he’s never stopped.
Not showing up won’t work; students marked absent will be forced to do a re-take. There’s incredible pressure for kids and teachers to conform. Principals in the Rochester City School District, for example, received thismemo asking them to identify any teachers who encouraged their students to opt out of the tests.
Bored with your econ homework? Draw.
Ninety minutes of silent staring is beyond discipline; it’s abuse. So if you have a kid in the affected grades and want him to survive the experience, I suggest you send him to school with several sharpened pencils and encourage him to draw. He can draw in his notebook if they aren’t confiscated; if they are, he can draw on the test papers. If his teachers take all the paper away, he can draw on the desk. If they take the pencils, he can draw on the walls with his saliva. Yes, he will be suspended, but do you really want him submitting to that kind of discipline?
Occasionally a student will get a teacher who’s amused by his doodles, but in my experience, complaints are more common.
Drawing is liberating. Drawing is liberation. I would never have lived long enough to graduate had my high school not been tolerant of my doodles and drawings.
In-school doodle by Dwight Perot.
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere,” wrote GK Chesterton. A friend sent that quote to me this week. How timely.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.