Trenton Sinks Lower

As you've no doubt noticed from my first few blog posts I'm absolutely obsessed over the academic and educational outlook for Imani and Naima - and they are four-years-old and six-months-old respectively. I blame it on the studies I've read that conclude that where they are by fourth grade will pretty much predict their "life outcome".

It's in this spirit that last Tuesday I picked up the latest issue of NJ Monthly magazine which is emblazoned with the headline NJ's Best High Schools. The cover promised to list the top 100 schools inside and I knew the school system we moved from - West Windsor-Plainsboro - would be on that list. That was one of the reasons we moved to 08540 in 1998. Our mailing address was "Princeton, NJ" address but the section of 08540 we moved to is really West Windsor Township. West Windsor-Plainsboro South High School (which was the only high school for the district when we moved there) is on the 2010 list at #16 out of 322 public high schools. The newer school West Windsor-Plainsboro North, which was built in response to all of the new residential development in West Windsor and Plainsboro, is still solidly in the Top 50 at #29.

The magazine then directs you to its website to see all the schools ranked 1 through 322 and so after setting down our weekly take from Fernbrook Farm in our kitchen I eagerly go to Roland's home office to pull up the magazine's site. And I scroll and scroll (and scroll) to find Trenton. Out of 322 public high schools Trenton is ranked 317.

I cannot describe the feeling I had seeing this ranking because it was on the occassion of the 2008 NJ Monthly rankings (they're done semi-annually) the Trenton Chapter of the NAACP mounted a campaign they called "310 Never Again" because, you guessed it, Trenton was ranked 310 out of 322.

For the 2010 rankings we moved 7 spots in the wrong direction; we moved even further to the bottom.

What will it take to turn around our schools?

Arts for Imani

This fall Imani will once again take a Preschool Ballet & Tap class at a local studio as well as take a to-be-determined visual arts class. Last year it was Crafty Creators at the Hamilton YMCA and the Art Start class offered by the ladies of Smudges & Strokes - whom I convinced to let Imani take the class despite being only 3 years old. Imani loves the visual arts in particular. My job owned an art gallery so she has been surrounded by fine art since she was 2 months old and she began to look forward to the art openings as a toddler, though it always seemed like she ran around the gallery more than she actually looked at the art.

We've encouraged her creativity at home. For years now Imani has been creating drawings and "mixed media" pieces on our living room coffee table that she would then tape to our living room wall as her "exhibit" (see exhibit A from earlier this year posted above!). Despite hiding the tape from her to prevent future random installations, I am encouraging Imani's love for the arts because my mother did the same for me.

I was raised in White Plains, a New York City suburb in well-to-do Westchester County, by a single mother who never made a salary above poverty level but who always encouraged my interest in the visual and performing arts. I started playing the recorder in primary school and by 4th grade I moved on to the flute. After renting a flute for a couple of years my mother somehow scraped up funds for me to buy a flute. During those years she also sent me to an after school program where Afrocentric instructors taught us about African art and to speak Swahili. One summer I went to a visual arts day camp - I'm assuming I was a scholarship kid - on the the campus of Purchase College, the arts school in the State University of New York system.

I took tap in an afterschool program at Battle Hill Elementary School and I took the modern dance classes offered at the children's center where my mother was a teacher's aid. When I was about 10 or 11 Mom and I tagged along with a friend of hers whose child was going to be evaluated for training at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Suited up in my leotard, I remember a stern Russian woman had me do a plie and a low arabesque and then while I stood in first position pronounced me suitable for the school to a man I now think was probably THE Arthur Mitchell. The girl we went with, who was a lean and lithe form to my muscular one and who had been in ballet since since she was like 5, wasn't accepted for training but she and I were both disappointed that day. My mother didn't expect me to be admitted and couldn't see bringing me to Harlem from White Plains weekly for ballet classes (of course, this all didn't prevent her from boasting about my admission for years!). Ultimately I continued to study modern and African with a local instructor with whom I would tag along to Manhattan to take classes at various studios which was an amazing experience. By sophomore year in high school I was admitted into a competitive dance program at Purchase College where I took classes multiple times a week. (I dropped the classes by senior year in favor of the school drill team, a job, and the mall!)

By high school I knew it was the performing arts that I loved: orchestra, band, jazz vocal ensemble, Cultural Horizons gospel choir, musicals (during the school year and the summer), these all among my cherished childhood experiences.

According to the National Arts Education Association, there are 10 lessons that the arts teach children.

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.



2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.



3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there re many ways to see and interpret the world.



4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.



5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.



6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.



7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.



8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.



9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.



10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Source: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications.

I was blessed in that I lived in a community with schools that were rich with arts opportunities and that my late mother, despite her modest means, understood how important the arts could be in my development. The reason I am determined to provide the arts for Imani is so she can have a childhood as full as mine was.

What, Me Overschedule?

Today is Imani's first day in Abbott Pre-School class. I like the head teacher and assistant teacher who both said they were pleased that we decided to place her in their class. "We treat the children well, no matter what class they're in," said the assistant, meaning just because this classroom is funded by the public school and therefore free (not including after care) doesn't mean they treat the children any less.

I called my in-laws after leaving the farm last night (we belong to a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, which I'll post about later) and Imani totally outed the new Abbott class. "Tell Mumsy I'm going to a new class, Mommy, and the we don't have to drive there we just walk down the hall and down the steps!" And so now my mother-in-law, who wasn't in favor of the move, knows the scoop. Her concern is that Imani is ahead of her age group and she isn't sure she'll get the attention she needs to continue to grow in the Abbott class. Nevertheless she said that she hopes it all works out.

Interestingly I found out that Imani has been to that classroom before when her "Community" (Montessori) class visited the Abbott classroom for joint activities. "Imani seems so much older than she is," the Abbott assistant teacher told me yesterday when I went to meet her, "she speaks so well for a child her age." I thought that was a good thing when she said it but in light of my mother-in-law's concern, I plan to watch Imani for changes, like lax speech.

Anyway, in addition to the Pre-School it's also time to register her for all her fall activities. A few weeks ago I posted the following on my Facebook page:

Planning Imani's fall activities: ballet/tap (Thurs), swimming (Sat), drawing (Mon), the farm (our CSA, Sat) plus Pre-K Scholars tutoring (Tues, Wed) from me. Am I overscheduling?

Overwhelmingly folks said, "Yes!" The funny thing is that I forgot one activity: Music Together, which I started doing with Imani a little before she was one-year-old and now I'd like to do with Imani and Naima as a family. The deal is, if you add on gymnastics which Imani also wants to do these are all activities that she requested -- ok, maybe not the Pre-K Scholars Kindergarten readiness tutoring from me, but everything else. And if you replace Pre-K Scholars in the list with "What Your Preschooler Needs to Know" book and workbook these are things she did last year!

So is it overscheduling if she asks for all these activities?