Bridget Richard

As my final article for EagleView News on the Arts & Entertainment Beat, I find it appropriate to take this time to recognize the small details of high school that have a surprising sense of inconspicuous artistry to them.

1.) Crowd Navigation
Hallways are simply narrow ballroom floors, each participant performing their own dance to get from one end to the other. Granted, this dance involves a lot more stumbling and wide-stepping than a typical waltz, but there is definitely an art in finding the gaps of people to surge by.

2.) Lesson Planning
Teachers are artists too, you know. It takes a lot of thoughtful consideration to prepare assignments and notes for how to make young people know new things. Surely at some point many students thought they could make better lesson plans themselves, but could they? I don’t think many see the thoughtful decisions and processes that teachers go through so often in order to perform at their fullest potential in the classroom. They’re like composers: orchestrating how every lesson and concept must balance with one another to create the harmony in a student’s understanding.

3.) Note Taking
Every student is the artist of a new painting every time they take pen to paper. Even when given the same passages from a textbook or the same slides on a PowerPoint, every student writes them down in their own way. Some use bullet points, while others use dashes or asterisks or open circles. The choices students make when they write their notes reveal a lot about not only who they are but what they find important–just like the decisions an artist makes with each brush stroke.

4.) Procrastination
Procrastination is most similar in its artistry to that of a tightrope walker. Both require an immense amount of balance, bravery, and an almost frightening disregard to the consequences if they make one slightly wrong step. Surely many students do not see procrastination as an art form, seeing how it is usually just a substitution of TV binge watching for homework. But then again, most artistic forms of expression are not always intentional. This form of time management is beautiful, and expresses the artist’s true values and priorities to the teachers around them.