Ode to An Art Teacher

With a lot of our little ones going back to school, I decided to repost a blog entry from this spring. Enjoy!

for all the teachers....

A recent quote from an Art Teacher I know,"Hours preparing for the art show tonight: too many to count...Graeters gift cards for those who helped hang the artwork: $20.00...seeing the look on a students face when they see an award ribbon on their artwork: priceless..."

I am sure at one point in your life you had a memorable art teacher, even if you did not like art. Some of those memories might be great, some not so great.

At some point everyone loved to cut and paste, I know I did.

When I went to college at 31 to get an associates degree in commercial art, I found that I had to redefine my image of art teachers. The curriculum covered everything from drawing to hand paste-up for printing and computer drawing and of course the required dose of English, History, and Econ.

The fine arts drawing class was the real surprise. The professor was a big fan of having your still life run off the page. *Gasp* "What do you mean? Like cut it off, not put it in the middle of the page?" *horrified* I was in shock. I got over it, loved the class and what that professor passed on to me.

And yes, you can draw a still life of crumpled brown paper bags!

And you can always run the image off the page.

Kinda like coloring outside the lines.

Besides grading, art teachers spend countless hours on lesson plans, examples for the students, ruin their clothes and clean up the messes. And hand out the awards at school art shows that make our children's eyes light up, our hearts swell and tears sneak into our eyes.

Hopefully sometime in your life there was an Art Teacher, who encouraged and allowed you to 'think outside the box' and 'color outside the lines.'

Thank them sometime, for they can change how our children view the world.

Art Teachers are priceless...