10 reasons to include performing arts in (home)schooling

There are all kinds of articles and studies out there right now in support of keeping fine arts in the schools. This comes at a time when the greater push is to improve and intensify academic learning in an increasingly homogenized and student saturated environment, all with fewer funds, so the battle to defend (or, on the flipside, defund) the arts is real, and it's a brutal one. 

A few months ago we were at the GP's for Calvin's anual checkup. His doctor, a young man whom I for speaking to me like an equal and Calvin like a capable human being, went over Calvin's list of "out of school" activities with us. I think he was just curious, or he may have been checking in because he knows that Calvin is homeschooled, and although we seemed to pass any test that might have been administered, we also seemed to flummox him with regards to Calvin's arts involvement. That's a lot of music, he said. It wasn't said with any kind of tone, so I don't know if it was meant as a judgement or merely as an expression of surprise, but it got me thinking. 

Calvin has choir rehearsal twice a week, band rehearsal twice a week, dance class twice a week, and a weekly piano lesson. He participates in anywhere from 2 to 4 theatrical performances a year. We study fine arts (drawing, painting, sculpture, and art viewing) at least twice a week. This is a lot, especially when I see it typed up here in front of me, and by no means do I think this level of involvement is right for everyone. But Calvin does the performing arts the way other kids do sports. He is trying several of them, and the amount of time he dedicates to them over the year is not really more than a child involved in team sports dedicates to those. Yet his involvement in the fine arts elicits a very different response than a child receives who is heavily involved in sports. 

Why this unequal respect for the two main paths of "extracurricular" involvement? Sports are heavily lauded for the benefits they bestow upon their participants, and rightly so. A sense of teamwork, self-respect, and physical fitness are just three of the many important things they are charged with teaching kids, and I don't at all doubt the veracity of those claims. I do, however, think the same things are taught through participation in the performing arts. I read an article recently that urged people to stop defending arts in the schools, the argument being that they need no defense, their value speaks for itself. If that were true, though, the battle for funding and support wouldn't be raging as we speak.

So in defense of performing arts in schooling (home or not), here are some of the things kids will learn or gain from that study:

Self discipline
It won't come right away. It might take years to achieve, in fact, but practice is self-discipline, and all arts require it. I've always told Calvin at the piano that music practice in particular is self-policing. Practice is sitting down to play a small part of a song over and over again until the whole family is going crazy, but you can finally play it right. You can't fake it, it's either right or it isn't. If it isn't, keep practicing. 

Accountability
The point of practice, or self-discipline, is to perfect a skill. In the days between classes or lessons, kids are responsible for putt their best effort into this achievement. It's a little like homework in that a parent can make a kid sit down and play their scales they way they can make them finish their math, but arts practice is less mechanical in nature, and the resulting achievements are assessed more fluidly. Ultimately, students practicing the fine arts are more responsible for the value of their practice time, and, thus, more fully accountable for their achievements or lack thereof.

The skill of public speaking
This is an obvious benefit from stage performance, but the ability to get up in front of others is taught in any and all performing arts. It's in the performing part. In preparing works to share with others, be they piano songs practiced for recital, or vocal music to be performed in a choir concert, children are learning the skills of selection and preparation with an eye toward communicating with an audience. Then they actually get up in front of that audience. Not everyone who practices performing arts will be a talented public speaker, but I'm willing to bet that they will all at least improve in this area.

Confidence and Self-respect
Similar to the skill of public speaking, kids who go through years of performing arts education gain a level of self respect from lessons learned about preparation and performance. Youth performance environments are designed to be supportive and encouraging. The main goal of youth recitals is to help young performers gain confidence in their skills and in themselves. A secondary lesson is: put your best into it, get your best out of it. Everyone applauds at a child's recital, which is supportive and encouraging, but kid will know when they've truly done their best, and many will learn to respect themselves and the process enough to the work in between.

Perseverance
Nothing is more frustrating than a section of song you can't quite get, or a line you can't remember correctly, or a step you keep tripping on. And nothing is more rewarding than finally getting it right. Practice may not always make perfect, but done correctly it does always improve capability, and that reward teaches perseverance.

Collaboration
Duets, ensembles, stage performances, dance troupes...though many people think of performing arts as producing divas, the truth is that, as in sports, there are more team players in the discipline than individual rising stars. Get your instruments in tune, set up group practices, follow the director as one, don't miss your entrances. Collaboration is key.

Self expression
All kids long for self-expression. We see this in the child singing at the top of their lungs in the shower, or in the three year old screaming at the top of their lungs on the grocery store floor. Performance arts, any fine arts, really, provide a healthy means of self-expression.

Social exploration
Any collaborative approach in any performing art gives kids a common goal and asks them to set differences aside to achieve it. As part of team work, kids will learn ways to overcome social obstacles together. More literally, kids participating in theatrical arts are given the opportunity to play-act a wide variety of social situations. Kids do this on their own in imaginative play, but here they'll do it with the benefit of coaching.

Cultural and global exploration
All of the arts are celebrations of culture and heritage, and many performing arts programs seek out pieces from world cultures for students to try out and learn from. 

Health and fitness
Especially true in theater and dance, but to some extent in all disciplines, the arts require a healthy life style and encourage physical fitness. While this necessity is obvious in dancers, think also of the need for great breath control and capacity in singers and wind instrumentalists, and also posture and fine motor control for all musicians. Piano players have some really strong arms and amazing abs.

Expansion and connection of all other subject areas
We've probably all heard about the studies linking music in particular to improved mental acuity and performance in other subject areas, like math. Reading music can help students improve their language skills as well. But we also try to include music, literature, and visual arts in our history and culture studies as we go. Since the arts are a celebration of culture and heritage, arts through time can be considered primary sources—snapshots in time—and there is a lot to be gained from studying them.

Lion King in Detroit

Tickets to see The Lion King in Detroit were amongst Calivn's packages under the Christmas tree this year, the show date being a perfect couple of weeks after the difficult return from Hawaii. This is a show I have wanted to see for some time. We've all heard so many great things about the costumes, the music, the stage presence. It's an epic show with a legacy larger than most. As a recent presence, it outshines the epic productions of my youth, like Phantom, Cats, and Les Mis. So what I'm about to say is going to be very unpopular. I was thoroughly unimpressed. I might even go so far as to say that I was utterly disappointed. The movie was sweet and charming with just the right blend of humor and intensity, but while the story remained much the same on the stage, a lot was lost to poor pacing, uneven use of space and characters, tasteless comedic additions, and a few new songs that seemed oddly out of place. 

Over all I'm not sorry that we went, but it only gets three out of four starts from any of us. 

Pools, gardens, ducks, and lions (a circuitous journey to Stratford)

We are just back from our final summer trip, and the last of our traditional it-isn't-summer-without-it trips: Stratford. Only this year it was a little different. Jon was headed in that direction to present his company's summer lecture series in a few different towns, and rather than have him go and come and go again, we tagged along with him for his week of work preceding our weekend theater tickets. This was a new thing for us, and one which required a lot of planning and a little getting used to. Let's just say that to make a tagalong trip successful, one really only need add pools.

Yes, throughout the week, while Jon was busy presenting to adoring masses of piano teachers (autographs are a common request, I kid you not), Calvin and I were busy becoming hotel pool connoisseurs. This was where the planning came in, because we had to make sure that the hotels Jon booked had pools to begin with, then we had to organize our time so that Calvin and I could take advantage of said pools while Jon worked, keeping in mind check-out times. It ended up with Calvin and I showering, throwing things in suitcases, and dashing out of hotel rooms just before the noon bell chimed, only to spend the next hour lounging in the lobby on our suitcases, eating lunches packed from the family cooler. It was a nifty system, once we got the hang of it, which was, oh, about Jon's last day of presentations.

So pool connoisseurs we have become, but we also made good use of travel time between cities, for though Jon was working, we ended up spending his family time in the afternoons, sight-seeing on the road, and reserving the evenings and nights (and mornings, of course) for work. Like I said, we really got our stuff together by about the last day, but we had a good time doing it, and we saw a lot of things—cities, and pools, and gardens, and shacks, and pools, and rain showers, and sunshine, and did I mention pools? All on our way to one of our favorite summer destinations: Stratford.

There were a lot of stops, and there are a lot of pictures (many from the phone this time, too, because so often I found myself in a place where I never expected to want pictures, then was glad to have the phone—which is good, because that's why we got it).

Day one is always the worst: the most driving combined with the most eagerness and the most impatience. That, and we got a little lost in Windsor when the money exchange was closed (how on earth do they expect people to spend money in their nightclub dives without a money exchange???), but we got it together eventually, then rewarded ourselves with root beer floats at a rest area (note to U.S. road commission: get A&Ws in the rest areas stat).

Day two saw a lot more action. Pool notes first: pool number one was warm and was a great size, but it was in the hotel basement and felt a little secluded. 

After swimming all morning we did our first shower-and-pack dash, then ate lunch and read in the lobby. It was actually kind of relaxing. Toronto was less so, but since we've become regular visitors to Chicago, we didn't find the city as taxing as some might. We found the CN Tower almost as underwhelming as the beer at the Steam Whistle Brewing, but enjoyed the trains at the Toronto Railway Museum.

Day three. The pool was actually pretty great, except that two hours of the morning it was being used for swim aerobics and water workouts for the (elderly? geriatric? local old folks?). We were still welcome to partake of the pool's wateryness, but there wasn't any room for us to swim, so instead we hung out in the deep end, getting a kick out of the collected grumpiness that filled the rest of the pool.

The afternoon was more successful. After our lunch/reading time in the hotel lobby, we all stopped at the Royal Botanical Gardens where we found bees, chipmunks, and a long dead and burried horse, but not as many flowers as one might expect. We stopped at three of their garden sites and their quaint tea house before heading to our final pre-Stratford stop, London (where our hotel looked delightfully like a castle).

Day four. The best pool yet, in part because it was really three pools in a fun atrium setting, but also because we stayed two nights there, so we had two full mornings to swim. Plus the hotel, in addition to being awesome because it looked like a castle, had a fascinating interior, including putt putt golf.

An added benefit of our castle hotel was its downtown London location, which allowed us to go for afternoon and evening walks between rainshowers. 

Day five: probably our best day outside of Stratford. On day five we enjoyed the castle hotel pool one last time before shoving off for the Fanshawe Pioneer Village. This is a quaint collection of old buildings (and some replicas), assembled roughly in the order of a timeline, yet somehow also in the shape of a town. We started off at a mid-1800s log cabin and moved through several other buildings from that era before entering the late 1800s, then the early 1900s. Along the way we saw demonstrations of varying sorts—blacksmith, wood working, sheep, an osprey, even a groundhog (okay, those last three weren't exactly demonstrations). We also met a period actor who was delighted to know that we were enjoying ourselves, even as frequenter visitors of Greenfield Village, and we got to see real live Indian Runner Ducks. We had a great time. I have only one warning: don't bother with the food.

Day five was also Jon's first day of actual vacation, and the day that we finally arrived in Stratford. It's hard for me to explain or describe our love affair with this town. The natives there are short of friendly, everything is overpriced, and getting service anywhere is difficult. But over the years we've come to look forward to our time there, staying in the family-owned motel with the perfectly quaint breakfasts, going for walks along the man-made "Avon" and talking to all the entitled water fowl, eating hand-dipped soft serve like you've never had anywhere else at Jenn & Larry's, and, of course, taking in the expertly produced plays (this year? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and As You Like It).

can you spot the two baby bunnies in the open grass?










wine sippy cups at intermission...

YPT's Tarzan

I mentioned back in January that Calvin had tried out for and gotten a chorus style part in the Young People's Theater production of Tarzan. What I didn't mention then (because I didn't know) was how much a life takeover that one moment would turn out to be. It's not just the rehearsals, which were numerous and long, nor the parental involvement, which turned out to be so absorbing that I swear the house went uncleaned for the final three weeks, but that the caliber of the show and the intensity of the people working it, young and old, rubbed off on us in some way. 

As he did during the audition back in January, Calvin took this entire journey in stride. Rehearsals for him were anywhere from once to four times a week and lasted for one to three hours. It seemed like a lot at times, especially on the nights when his earlier choir rehearsal meant he was eating a cold dinner in the car between the two activities, or on nights when he got home fifteen minutes before his usual bedtime. But he loved every minute of it and expressed only disappointment on nights when there was no YPT rehearsal. 

I have no idea what went on in those rehearsals that left him so eager to return because parents were never allowed in. You dropped your child off at the door before it started and picked him up at the door when it was over. Rehearsals were run entirely by the director, assistant director, music director, choreographer, and an indispensible producer. With a cast of one-hundred-and-seven that is a testament to the professionalism and dedication of all the kids involved, as well as to the respectful and patient attitudes of the adults working with them. That or it's a statement about how good kids are when their parents are not around.

Though the lack of parent invitation at rehearsals does mean that parents weren't involved. Being a mostly volunteer organization, parents were strongly encouraged to participate by volunteering for a particular team, which is how I found myself working on the costume that was responsible for the biggest and most impressive costume show in YPT memory. I didn't know what I was getting into when I signed up, of course—the costumes weren't yet designed at that time—but only a two months later I was putting in my own measurable hours every week. There were weeks when costume pieces were spread throughout the house, days when we couldn't even eat at the dining room table, and all the time Calvin danced through our own jungle of costumes singing his Tarzan songs.

The months of preparation culminated in a final two weeks of intense rehearsal. That last week Calvin and I were at the theater every night from four to nine for full run-throughs, bookended by the application and removal of stage makeup at home. I was ever so thankful yet again that we are homeschoolers, because we basically took the week off and spent our mornings outside and our afternoons resting inside with books before applying makeup and heading out the door. For the whole week we lived and breathed the Tarzan jungle and all the people—actors and volunteers—who were part of it.

And Friday night, Jon and I dropped Calvin off for opening night . . . and went out for dinner before taking in that first show from the audience. It was a fun date night to celebrate the survival of theater "hell week" (which we both remember fondly from our high school days). Dinner was fun, the evening was beautiful, and the show. Even after all we had learned of the organization through our months of involvement, even after all the nights I'd spent backstage working costumes during the final week of rehearsals, we were totally unprepared for the caliber of the performance. It was like Broadway with children. The voices were delightful, the dancing spectacular, the costumes pretty darn amazing. 

We went back the next day with our parents (the doting grandparents) and then I worked the final two shows backstage. I was torn the whole time between wanting to be in back or in front of the curtain and loved every minute in both places. Families from our homeschooling group and from the neighborhood came and Calvin basked in the attention of his friends. He loved being on stage, and it was obvious from every seat.

While there are so many things I could say about how well YPT is run—how well they take care of the kids and how much they teach them—there is nothing I can say to truly describe how wonderful this experience has been for our family. Now, a week out from the final performance, as I am finally getting the house back into working order and finding time to make fresh dinners and sort the gardens out from under the weeds, Calvin is already talking about "the next show" and what he can do to prepare and how he will audition. 

Tarzan (photos taken of rehearsals/performances from the front of the stage are by YPT photographers Sabine Gabaron, Krista Campeau, and Susana Pecina)

(home)school play

It's been a performance week here all around. Calvin participated in a master class at Jon's piano studio yesterday, had long Tarzan rehearsals on three evenings, and this afternoon was the HAA end of the indoor year play, talent show, still projects display extravaganza. Calvin, of course, did all three. He wouldn't to leave any stone unturned, or any activity undone.

The play this year was homegrown—a story written then scripted by one of our own homeschool kids. It was a bit of a socialist production focused the uneven distribution of wealth between the seasons, which in this case were countries of their own. The moral of the story was "share to avoid going to war with the have-nots". It was cute and well-adapted, and I had a good time coming up with a last minute costume for my military leader of the have-nots (billed as chief warrior from the fall).

I apologize for the dark and blury shots from the play. Photography in the gym where we hold our indoor activiites is touchy, to say the least. And I was so busy enjoying the talent show that I forgot to take video of Calvin's performance, which was brilliant. 

But be sure to hop on over to his own blog to see the photograph and accompanying poem (both his own) that he turned in for his still project display. He is considering entering both in the 4H youth show this year as well.

Up next? It's dance recital weekend.