Tag Archive for: education

Fighting the Good Fight

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Fighting the Good Fight—For the Arts

by Saralyn Richard

My first foray into the world of teaching was as an English instructor, and I learned a lot about working with students in a required academic subject.  Several years into that career, I earned a graduate degree in administration, and I switched out of the English department and into Fine Arts. The Fine Arts department consisted of visual arts, speech and theater, music, and foreign language (still a mystery how that fits, except that foreign language does involve some performance skills).

As the Fine Arts chairperson, and later the Assistant Principal in charge of Fine Arts (and other departments), I learned a few things immediately:

  1. As elective subjects, the students were more motivated to learn, attended more frequently, and earned better grades than in the required subjects.
  2. The arts provided extensive opportunities for extra-curricular activities that enhanced and enriched the school community as a whole. In essence, Fine Arts was the heart of the school.
  3. Every year when it was time for students to choose electives, the Fine Arts had to fight for its existence.

One might wonder why classes that were so successful and valuable would have to justify their worth continually. The reasons run deep, and they extend beyond the school system and into society as a whole. There are mandates—required subjects take precedence, so resources of time, space, and personnel must be assigned to them first. There are budget restrictions. Performing arts may require expensive equipment, uniforms, and supplies. The extra-curricular activities associated with the classes add another layer of expense with travel to competitions and coaching costs.

The annual effort to promote the department and recruit students to take the classes was monumental, and it included some extraordinary teachers and events, like a Fine Arts Festival, to make a difference.

Fortunately, our board members, administrators, teachers, and parents embraced the value of the arts and pushed to keep the department viable.

Fast forward to the present, and I find myself still in the fray. As an author, I face increasing challenges in the literary arts—publishing and marketing woes, intense competition for reach into audiences, threats of AI, and more. I also serve as the President of the Board of our local historic theater, and I find the same challenges there, a scarcity of resources, a need to fill the seats for the shows, a competition for entertainment dollars.

The arts are still considered frills—nice if you can have them, but easy to cut if you need to trim the budget. Yet I can’t imagine life in a society where there are no books, plays, concerts, ballets, symphonies, or art galleries to provoke thought and discourse and to touch people’s hearts. We can’t have culture without arts, and we can’t have a full life without culture.

I dislike politics in all its forms, but I always stand up for the arts wherever and whenever I can. Do you?

Saralyn Richard writes award-winning humor- and romance-tinged mysteries that pull back the curtain on people in settings as diverse as elite country manor houses and disadvantaged urban high schools. An active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America, Saralyn teaches creative writing and literature, and continues to write mysteries. Her favorite thing about being an author is interacting with readers like you. Visit Saralyn here, on her Amazon page here, or on Facebook here.

 

Banned Books and Tip Lines to Snitch on Teachers by Juliana Aragón Fatula

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1990’s Cast from Su Teatro Intro to Chicano History 101 by Anthony J. Garcia 

Dear Reader, 

I woke at 4:30 a.m. and realized that I’m losing my mind. I thought about the state of the country and I began to cry and laugh simultaneously. I wondered if I’d gone insane to be able to laugh about the news that Governors were not only banning books but creating tip lines for parents to call in to report/snitch on teachers teaching history, culture, art, music, etc. that offends their students by revealing the atrocities perpetrated against women, people of color, religions, gender fluidity, whatever. I began to cry again at the absurdity of our nation and the political turmoil that surrounds us because the left and right are strangling each other with hate against anything they don’t like. 

I watched last night’s DVR recording of my favorite journalist, Ari Melber, and his guest the world renowned astrophysicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson. I love them both. I watched the interview and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Neil was speechless several times because the clips that Ari showed him from the new blockbuster movie, Don’t Look Up, showed Meryl Streep as the President of the U.S. telling her supporters lies. They believed her lies instead of the scientists who were telling the world that an asteroid was hurling towards Earth and would destroy everyone and everything much like the extinction of the dinosaurs. He laughed at the clips but explained that it was frightening because it paralleled what the previous leader of the U.S. had done by lying to the world and claiming that he had won the election and lying about the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th saying it was a peaceful protest of patriots. wtf.

I listened to the two men, who I respect, talk about this movie that explained how we are headed for doomsday because SCIENCE and facts/truth no longer matter to people. I wondered what the fudgecicle happened to people to make them so easily duped. 

I had a good cry and remembered that books were being banned because they were teaching students to open their eyes and learn about how this country was stolen, how indigenous people were slaughtered, how Africans were kidnapped, and made to work for those same people who slaughtered the indigenous and forced to work as slaves and make those murderers rich. Students’ books and libraries are being listed as books to ban because they tell the truth about how this country came into being and how people were beaten, hung, murdered, raped, humiliated because they were other. LGBTQ books would be banned, books written by people of color about their culture would be banned, religious books would be banned if they didn’t teach Christianity. I threw up a little in my mouth and began to sob. 

I must have cried, laughed, puked, shat, farted, broke into hysterics for hours. Then I drug myself off the bathroom floor and began to write this post. My books would be banned because I dared to write poetry about drug addiction, child molestation, rape, genocide, alcoholism, cultural appropriation, religious persecution. I felt sick again and dragged myself back into the bathroom to purge the negativity out of my soul and watch it swirl down the toilet.

I for an instant thought, I don’t want to live in a world where books are banned and then I realized that if I flushed myself down the toilet and died nothing would change and THEY would win. I made a pact with myself that I would keep writing my stories, poems, plays, novels, essays and telling my truth because the truth matters. And I know that when I was teaching I would have been one of those teachers that was snitched on the tip line for teaching the truth/science/facts/history/world culture/world peace because the haters gonna’ hate and the only way to fight them is with the truth, and books that are banned are the ones the students need to read. FREEDOM.

Juliana Aragón Fatula’s ancestors indigenous to Aztlan, migrated from New Mexico to Southern Colorado. In 2022 she was awarded the title of Corn Mother for the Return of the Corn Mothers Project funded by the Colorado Folk Arts Council, Chicano Humanities Arts Council, Metropolitan State University of Denver and US Bank. She is the author of The Road I Ride Bleeds, Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, and Red Canyon Falling on Churches (winner of the High Plains Book Award in 2016.) She has been a Macondista since 2011, was a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities ambassador and Director of Creative Writing for las mujeres unidas de CSU Pueblo and she conducted writing workshops for Colorado Writers in the Schools K-12, Bridging Borders, Cesar Chavez Academy, and Cañon City Middle School. She performed in the nineties with Su Teatro Cultural Performing Arts Center and after Operation Desert Storm, she toured in the Persian Gulf for the Department of Defense with the Latin Locomotions. She is shopping her first mystery, The Colorado Sisters, for a publisher. She believes in the power of education to change lives.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

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By: Joelle Charbonneau
I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.  I thought I wanted to be a music theater and
opera performer.  At least, that’s what I
spent my undergrad and post-graduate schooling studying.  And I guess I actually wanted to do that
since I did the professional singing, dancing, acting thing for a number a
years.  While I bellowed arias and show
tunes on stage, I also worked as a systems administrator and report analyst,
which stretched my mind and pushed me to learn new things.  And somewhere along the way I started
teaching and wow do I love it.  Helping
students discover not only their singing voices, but confidence in themselves
and their futures is a pretty amazing thing. 
Oh yeah – and now I write. 
And I love that too.  Some days,
the need to fill the blank page stresses me out.  There are moments where I wonder why I chose
to sit behind a screen worrying about what comes next.  But I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
The funny thing is, I never took a college level English
class.  I never took creative
writing.  And I am a writer. 
I point this out because as a teacher, I work to help prepare
my high school students for college.  The
one thing that strikes me over the years is the notion that high school
students have to *know* what they want to be when they grow up.   From the time students enter their freshman
year of high school, there is a strange notion that they should be working
toward a specific future goal.  Not just
getting into college or having a happy future, but taking the right classes to
get them into a specific college for a future they might not even want to have
when they know more about it.
I *knew* what I wanted to do with my future when I entered
college.  I wanted nothing more than to
spend my life singing and dancing on the stage.  And I still love that.  But I have grown and changed and learned so
much since those high school days.  I’m
not longer that person.
So, I guess my point to this rant is that I hope we all work
to encourage our children to study something they love.  To strive to learn things that matter to them
because those are the things that shape their lives.  I believe that filling the soul is just as
important as filling the mind.  When we
fill both—amazing things can happen.
So—dare I ask?  What did you want to be when you graduated high school and what are you doing now?