Teaching Children How and Why to Learn, Part Two: The Place of the Arts

If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

Ever since I was young, I've loved to read, and as an extension of reading, write.

Does it show? :-)

Today is my second half of my soapbox lecture to my friend, whose 12-year-old daughter quit school and now wants to happily live off her mother forever. Or so it seemed. On further investigation, she's a good kid who got frustrated with our local public school system, but she and her parents are new to homeschooling. I gave them the same thing advice I wrote yesterday, with a little more detail.

But what if she declares that she wants to go into the arts, instead of the other six fields? What should my friend say?

I know what I would say if her daughter were mine...

 

My Attempts at a Career in the Arts

I'd spent my whole life since I was seven, putting on shows, treading the boards, doing art in one way or another - writing stories and winning awards, magic shows in fifth grade, singing in choirs, then theatre - all this from a very shy (almost pathologically shy) girl. Art helped me finally find my voice when I was 16 years old, and I mean that literally. I spoke so infrequently in public that I couldn't identify what I sounded like before then.

Of course, this meant to my mind that I should go directly into the arts as a career. A life of watching television meant of course I could write for it, or for movies, or anything, and I would certainly be successful. After a couple years of high school theatre, I set off to New York City to become an actor.

 

Mistake #1 - No Service Mindset

What I didn't realize, first of all, was that this adventure was for me, and no one else.  It was a whole lot of 'look at me' when there was an audience there I needed to take care of, with no idea what they wanted or needed.

Making a living requires doing things for other people, not for us. My art was intensely mine, and while that helped me, that didn't help anyone else. People pay money for art that serves them, not me.

 

Mistake #2 - Hitting the money wall

Within six months, I was hurting for money. Plain and simple.

Not having prepared myself with any job skills, I took jobs that were dangerous. I had a night shift cutting photographs with a chopper machine that threatened all my digits. When I was told I'd have to start drinking coffee or I'd never survive, it became a choice between my religious beliefs or my work.

I quit that job before I lost any fingers.

Then I tried telemarketing - calling people on the phone and offering them tickets to the opera.

Lasted less than a day.

Waitress lasted less than a day. Fortunately, I wasn't pretty enough for the job where I work at a black box theatre bar offering Asian gentlemen drinks, in my naiveté. But I applied for it.

 

Mistake #3 - No Work Ethic 

But even if these jobs didn't last, most (other than the bar job) so low paying and took up so much time that I wasn't working on acting. My acting teachers noticed that I wasn't doing the homework they were giving me, because it was a choice between exercises or sleeping.

My sleep and general lack of organization won out, and I started failing the classes I came there to take.

Living forever on the edge of your income, nearly homeless, unable to form or support a family while working on a dream - everyone does it. Comparatively few make it to a living wage doing what they love in the arts. 

It's like telling your child to win the lottery for a living. How many parents are out there doing that?

 

Mistake #3 - Not really my dream after all

Eventually I left New York to move back home with my parents - a complete psychic blow.

I kept trying - taking acting classes, getting work in Renaissance festivals, auditioning for local work - for a time, but eventually I quit acting for the reason (get this!) that I hated people watching me.

A very good reason to quit a career where people pay to watch you. But I wasn't prepared for anything else, so I had to start from scratch.

If I had listened to my father (who very gently tried to tell me about computers and programming, his great loves, and my occasional interest), I would have been able to support myself that way while doing smaller acting jobs on the side, or working in community theater, or even voice-over work, so only a very few would have to see me! 

Instead, I had to work a very long time to get to a point where I could support myself and my family, fortunately working off the typing classes my mother insisted I take in high school. I got very good at typing, and turned that skill into a low-level administrative career that paid the bills and allowed me and my husband to set ourselves up independently. From there, I worked over into data science, and now building my computer skills.

But scrambling to learn skills as an adult instead of starting younger was a great, great loss to me.

 

Caveat - When You Can't Leave It Alone

Granted - there are some people who can't simply walk away from the arts. I'm one of them.

I did try to stop writing, for a time. I refer to that time period of my life, doing nothing but what made money or other useful stuff, as "The Desert". That's what it felt like.

So I picked it up again, but in a different way. Hence, this blog.

And for my friend's 12-year-old girl, I would tell her the same. Start with the practical. Look at those six categories - and notice that each one of them contain something that has to do with the arts.

 

Construction - set building and design for movies or plays

Law - entertainment lawyers are needed for contracts

Business - someone has to market all those movies, or count their money

Computers - special effects require computers. And computers always need fixing.

Healthcare - every set has a nurse or some sort of emergency personnel

Education - many performers and artists teach, in or outside of public education

 

So that's an option. Only a few of many. But there's better pay to be found in less glamorous areas - don't avoid the places where fewer people are looking. Besides, ever talk to someone who works at Disneyland? They don't always go there on their time off, if you know what I mean.

In Practical or Artistic Work, You're Gonna Work and Work HARD - Hard Work is Good for You

There's plenty of options open to those who want to make art for themselves and not be told what to make by those who will pay. Exercising a talent might not make you rich, but it always makes your life richer and more meaningful.

My novels will never make as much money as Harry Potter made, but the world I built within those pages is just as rich and real to me. And I love sharing them with anyone who's interested. That's the work I love to do.

My children draw art, write poetry, sing and make music, make and play games, because it makes them happy. Some of them would like to go professional, some don't. But all of them have education and skills to build a life with, and then add the arts on top, like the frosting on a cake. But don't ignore the cake and eat only frosting like a maniac - yes, I like frosting too, but the cake carries the frosting.

 

Get Both Kinds of Education 

So, if you must build a career in the arts, choose the day job skills first.

Use the day job to build your life, and then circle back to bring in the arts. Maybe you'll get lucky enough to quit the day job one day. Maybe you won't want to.

Isn't it nice to have choices? And not have to coerce Asian businessmen in a black box theater bar to buy you drinks you shouldn't be drinking, while living with your parents forever? 

I think so. 

Back to Conference quotes again tomorrow. Thank you for listening to my soapbox rant. :-) 

Teaching Children How and Why to Learn, Part One - The Practical

 If you missed Part Two, click here.

 I'm pausing my work on the Conference talks because I'm pregnant...

Not with child, but with an idea.

 

A friend of mine has a 12-year-old girl. In her child's 12-year-old wisdom, she's stopped attending middle school, telling her mom she wants to homeschool, but she doesn't want a teacher other than Mom. And she doesn't want to study anything like math or science or reading or anything boring like that. Mostly, her mom says, this wise 12-year-old talks to her friends and plays online games all day long.

The mom is worried for her safety at school, so she talked herself into letting her daughter come home, but she's never homeschooled a child before, and doesn't know what she's doing. Plus she's afraid of the child getting angry at her.

Oh dear Mom - who's ghosting me at the moment because she's afraid of what I might tell her - you've started an advice storm you can't just stop now. So you, dear reader, are getting the big dump of advice. 

 

Our family's homeschooling journey with five kids ended with all of them getting their associates or bachelor's degrees, finding work and learning to support themselves and others, so we managed our way through formal schooling and homeschooling. But there would be things I would do differently now, looking back.

 

Two Parts to  Education

What this mom doesn't understand (and honestly, what I didn't understand when I first started out) was that there are two goals to education. 

Today I'm talking about the first one - the practical side.

Education is about learning how to work and how to serve as a member of society. There's lots of different ways to do that.

If my child took him or herself out of school, or refused to work, this would be the first thing I would tell them.

 

If you don't work, you don't eat. That's a basic rule of life.

 

There would be chores galore, for a child who's too young to get a job outside the home.

There might even be a small business happening, if the house didn't provide enough work. Offer to babysit, or mow lawns, or volunteer at a local business. That child would immediately be working, and working 6-8 hours a day at least.

If this didn't drive them back to school screaming, there would be one additional assignment.

Choose a Career Path 

I would sit said child down and spread out their options on the table, with six cards in front of them.

Society has six areas where work is in demand and where pay meets a livable standard for individuals and families -  construction, law, business, computers, healthcare, and education.

Decide on your occupation.

 

Perhaps said child, whose whole world up til now has been friends and online gaming, doesn't know what to choose.

The first year then, in between chores or running a small baby business, would be involved in six different 2-month units of getting to know each area.

Khan Academy has great videos that break down a lot of different kinds of careers in these areas. Child would watch those videos and report back on what she liked or didn't like.

My friend probably knows people, from her own work or from church, who would be willing to sit down and talk about their work with said child. She could look for ways to get child involved locally with people who work in those fields, and start getting an idea of what a day looks like in each kind of career.

Two months, looking deeply at each area.

 

After 12 Months

Eventually the child will start to gravitate towards one field or the other. After the first year, exhausted from constant unpaid manual labor and ready to settle down and reach for something that he or she likes and might be good at, my friend and her daughter could sit down and get a plan together for what she needs to do to excel in that area.

Maybe school or college would be required. Maybe tradeschool. Maybe she could just get her GED and skip the whole school system altogether with skills and a portfolio of work.

But the child makes a choice, and works to achieve in that direction, having chosen for his or herself after investigating options. But now she's bought into one field or another, and knows what school is for, and wants something more for herself than doing chores for Mom forever. But those chores have secretly built muscles and a work ethic - something the child didn't have before.

This is where moms and dads have to be ready to be hated for a few years, and not lean on their children for love and acceptance, or this whole process gets short-circuited, and then both the parent and child are cursed for it. The kids will love you again at the end of this when they're grownups and making money, and they'll love you even more for guiding them with adult wisdom and preparing them for their future, rather than letting them play games all day long and then have to go find work with nothing. 

 

So often we think children just know what they should do - but then they get out into the work world after several years of school, with no idea of their direction. Why should they keep going with learning without any sort of idea what they should do? Not all kids love learning for its own sake.

I don't blame my friend. My parents went through that same haphazard process, and so did we. But it's not good to raise children who don't know how to work, and then suddenly expect them to work. Learning to work as an adult when you've never worked before is a crushing process, and sending our kids out into the world with no skills in at least one area of life is not fair to them, or to us, who then have to support helpless adults.

 

What about the Arts?

Why didn't you mention the arts when you mentioned careers, you say? Why wasn't the arts one of those cards?

That deserves a soapbox all its own, and that's coming tomorrow...