Weekly Report | Kids are Artists (Vol.4)

I bet you heard the sentence “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up” by Pablo Picasso right? It might sound very cliché, but I find this true.

The other day, I had a chance to do a mural art together with the kids on two walls of the school’s side entrance. Before we started, the principal showed us a rough sketch of how he wanted it to look like. We said, “okay” to him, but with a pretty much disagreeing mood. As we were sketching though, the kids and I changed our minds and decided to do it just the way we wanted. By the time the principal came back to check things up, we already painted some parts of the wall, which means, he could not really ask us to redo it. The end result however, was he being pleasantly surprised to find something even better than what he wished to see. *YAY*

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Another case was when I asked them to make short skits of going to a restaurant. These kids love performing and I have seen them did it a couple times before in front of the whole school (even though it is always performed in Chinese). Doing it is something that they like, so they were very motivated despite the lack of vocabularies that they can use to make dialogues. Spending these past few weeks as their ‘teacher’, it just can not get any better then seeing them getting excited when learning. On top everything else; what delighted me the most was to see their creativities. One group had a scene were the food was thrown to the air, another group give his friend a piggy-back-ride to mimic taxi driving and another group mimicked a chef who was cooking by dancing the PPAP dance. Who would have thought that so many could happen in a restaurant visit?

(A student showing up his dance moves)

On the other hand, I also notice how a typical kid in this school (and probably in many other Asian countries as I could relate to my previous education background in Indonesia), would go to cram schools after he/she finishes school in late afternoon. Then he/she will go home very late at night, to do extra homework or maybe just binge-watch the TV. I think these days a lot of kids have to deal with the pressure of having good grades with extra stress from cram schools and barely spend time to explore their own interests or simply to enjoy their childhood. Their brains have limits and they are still developing. I personally do not think it is an effective way of learning, but more importantly, I believe they deserve to be the kids they are and the artists they are.

("And.. action!")

Are schools the reason why these kids are no longer artists once they grow up?