The Arts are alive at Leelanau and Glen Lake Schools

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The 10th in a year-long series of articles about local art, culture and creativity.

The unprecedented, August 2015 storm in Glen Arbor provided a teachable moment for Leelanau School visual art instructor Kaz McCue. The moment was born of a Facebook post, in which one of his students opined that many of the old trees felled by the storm’s 100-plus mph winds “have heard a lot of stories.”

“That’s where it started,” McCue said.

And “that” became the totem pole project.

Totem poles are, historically, monumental sculptures carved from tall trees. The Leelanau School project got its totem tree from Art’s Tavern owner Tim Barr. He donated a 26-foot-tall cedar, which had graced the Barr home before the storm had turned it into a supine lawn ornament. McCue’s students resurrected the cedar through the transformative power of art. And like other historic totem poles, this one was endowed by it creators with a story to tell about their tribe.

Some 30 Leelanau School students, ranging in age from 14 to 19 years old, moved the tree, and prepared it. Six of those kids, drawn from McCue’s Studio Art class, looked to the school’s Seven Core Values as they developed a design for the totem pole. At the top of it they carved a thunderbird, the Leelanau School mascot and a spirit guide representing the value of courage. At the bottom of the pole, a salmon was carved to represent the Crystal River, the river that runs through the school grounds and reminds one of the lessons of stewardship. In between these two markers were symbolic references to the Sleeping Bear legend (leadership), Lake Michigan (integrity), school stories (awareness), the human relationships that bind the members of this educational community (interconnectedness), and a coyote (resilience). So, not only did the students involved with this project learn more about their school’s philosophic underpinnings, they also learned how to strip bark from a tree, how to cut and carve wood, and how to apply decorative paint on cedar wood. The pole was planted last spring at the Beach Bards bonfire pit, a storytelling circle overlooking Lake Michigan on the school’s property.

Sound like out-of-the-box academics? This is how art gets taught at the Leelanau School. “We’re a college preparatory school, working to get students ready for college,” McCue said. But the road taken toward that destination is paved with “a certain amount of classroom autonomy.”

It’s an article of faith to say the arts are an important part of a child’s education. Educators and administrators at both Glen Lake Schools and Leelanau School agree. Where they differ is in the execution of the lessons. Art education at the Leelanau School is not directed by the State of Michigan Standards, Benchmarks, and Grade Level Content Expectations for Visual Arts, Music, Dance, and Theater, a pages-long document detailing how and what public school students need to learn about these art forms. Private schools are not subject to the same state standards. “We need to keep our standards at least as high as the State of Michigan’s,” said Laura Hood, Leelanau School music instructor. [Leelanau School requires two years of art education for graduation to the state’s one-year requirement.] “We’re still covering the same information in our classes, but we may approach the teaching of it differently.”

“We have winter term classes here,” Hood continued. “For five weeks starting in January, our students take two courses. One of the classes I teach is a songwriting class [with Leelanau County musician Pat Niemisto]. For that whole five weeks, I don’t allow anyone else’s music to be played in my classroom. It has to be all-original music. I don’t want to hear Guns N’ Roses.”

During the course of that winter term, Hood’s students work on song structure, chord theory, lyric writing and how to bring all these moving parts together in the form of a song.

“Then we work as an ensemble and put on a concert,” she said.

Process takes precedence over the end product,” Hood said. “As much as possible, I try to let the students be self-driving in their music [studies]. I try to let that creative flow happen so they have ownership over the end product.” A concert, for instance, is one end product; but in Hood’s classroom, it isn’t the end of the lesson. A concert is followed by a discussion of how it went, how the students performed as a unit to make one piece of music come alive, what challenges did the performance present and reveal. As such, this kind of end product becomes a self-renewing circle of learning.

Glen Lake High School visual art teacher Jill Walker offers classes in jewelry making, drawing painting, computer animation, collage and 3-D media, all elective subjects from which students may choose to meet the state’s graduation requirement of one full year of visual, performing and applied art instruction. Walker uses the state’s standards to build her curriculum about technique and craftsmanship. The development of each student’s creativity is the flip side of the lesson. Developing creativity isn’t something that’s “taught,” but more like an exploratory expedition that puts both teacher and student into uncharted territory. There really aren’t user manuals that provide teachers with a formula for helping students learn to quiet the booming, critical voice of an internal editor; the voice that makes the kids scream back, “I can’t do this.” Developing a student’s creativity is about encouraging them, giving them permission to go with the flow and see where it takes one. These are educational challenges not necessarily addressed by standardized requirements.

“They [the students] often want to rush the process,” Walker said. “Getting them to slow down and enjoy the process is difficult. We live in a we-want-it-now-now-now time. One of my jobs is to try to help them learn how to enjoy the process, and when they make mistakes I tell them to learn from their mistakes.”

Learning from one’s mistakes isn’t something the ever-changing constellation of technology and computerized devices can speed up. Personal technological devices are ubiquitous. Every kid has one and/or has access to one or more. “Technology has just taken over everything,” said Margaret Weeks. She has taught at both public and private schools. Weeks’s most recent professional posting is at the Glen Arbor Art Association (GAAA) after-school art program, four week sessions offered to elementary kids throughout the school year. Weeks works with kids in grades 4-6. “In school, every child has an iPad and a cell phone on their desk. I find that very disturbing. It pulls you away from the here-and-now. When I’m teaching, I want to get the kids excited about what they’re making. I want them to realize you get art from using your hands, your mind, from trying things out and making mistakes.”

On the other hand, said Glen Lake teacher Jill Walker, “technology is fabulous for research.” Walker uses her computer in the classroom like a 21st century overhead projector. “I can type in ‘cathedral windows,’ and boom!” Her Google search brings up “so many examples” of cathedral windows to share with the students.

“It’s a another tool in [the teacher’s] tool box,” Walker said.

“Technology can be both friend and foe,” Margaret Weeks said. “I’ll bring in my computer to show the kids images of what an artist has made; but I’ll also bring in books for the students to look at; or we’ll go for a walk in the woods so they can base their [creating] on personal experience” with the trees, plants and animals living in the same neighborhood.

“The arts just don’t live in the art building,” said J.D. Friley, head of Leelanau School. “They live everywhere.” Art instruction at Leelanau School is not compartmentalized, but integrated into the instruction of other subjects. The teaching of history might offer a chance to introduce students to the dramatic arts by asking them to role play the historical figures about which they’re learning, Friley said. His example brings to mind the much-lauded, much-celebrated, much-awarded Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the life of an American founding father made real in 46 songs, all of them in the rhymed, poetic street meter called rap.

This kind of cross-pollination across disciplines characterizes Leah Lawson’s teaching life. She wears many hats at Glen Lake Elementary School. One of these hats is math enrichment teacher. The other is art teacher. And yet another is the designer of a math enrichment program which incorporates art education into the curriculum.

“Although not a lot of people think this way, math and the arts are very related,” Lawson said. Proportions. Ratios. Fractions. They’re as much a part of the visual artist’s toolbox as they are the mathematician’s. Lawson asks her young students to draw a picture of a rain cloud, or a face or the sun, then color it, then draw a grid on top of it.

“And if 15 out of 100 of those gridded squares are yellow, that’s a way to show them how fractions are part of a design,” said Lawson, who also teaches art to 1st-3rd graders at the GAAA after-school art program.

Many children are kinesthetic learners — they need to touch, feel, have the lesson presented with a tactile element. The learning needs to involve some physical component rather than be delivered only as a lecture or demonstration. For this reason, the visual and performing arts “are a critical factor at our school,” J.D. Friley said. Leelanau School’s student population includes kids diagnosed with attention disorders, high-functioning autism as well as other kids who just don’t fare well in traditional educational settings. These kids often struggle with focus, “so we’re always looking for ways to keep their hands busy. With the arts, students are using their hands to learn, and it’s a great way to keep focused.” According to Glen Lake’s Leah Lawson, “We’re really figuring out that students are going to have a stronger retention rate when they associate (the subject) with something that motivates them.”

Leelanau School’s Laura Hood employs a Trojan horse strategy to motivate her students. “I get the students hooked on playing the guitar, and then I sneak all of the more traditional learning skills and technical information in the back door of their passion,” Hood wrote in a recent email. This strategy engineered by the Ancient Greeks plays out in the decor of Hood’s classroom. It strikes a visitor as the visual manifestation of the teenage mind, in which a lot is going on but the contents of which may not seem well ordered. Hood’s music classroom does not conform to the archetype, which is to say those straight rows of desks all facing the front of the classroom. Instead, Hood’s classroom has the feel of a managed storm. Chairs aren’t lined up in rows, but are scattered around the room at all sorts of angles. One walks through a maze of music stands to get from Point A to Point B. And where one might expect to find a chalkboard, one finds walls lined with hanging string instruments. The walls are also embellished with eighth notes Hood stencils onto them each time one of her music students graduates. “They get to paint it in however they want — with a skull and cross bones, a lizard. They get to put their own personality into this note,” she said. If nothing else, Hood’s classroom wall signifies that the arts can help the student discover an original voice, whether that voice is expressed through a pencil mark or a dance movement or a musical note.

“For many of our nontraditional learners, the arts offers them an arena in which they can really shine and feel a sense of success among all of the challenges of their academic day,” Hood wrote. “Through their success in the arts, we can teach our students skills in self-discipline, problem solving, working with others, critical thinking, supporting their opinions, and the list goes on and on. All of this knowledge absolutely transfers to every subject that they are learning in school.” Life skills dressed up as music instruction.

And then Hood brings another ancient Greek to the conversation. “To quote Plato, ‘I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for in the patterns of music and all of the arts are the keys of learning.’”