#ThursdayThoughts

Today I'm thinking about the necessity, the vitality of arts & music education. In the United States we have chosen to focus on incomplete education. We have elevated common core education and neglected arts and music education. This has ramifications that we are beginning to see with the later millennials and we have yet to see as this incomplete education continues. The current president of the United States has contributed to the problem by continuing to threaten cutting the funding to the National Endowment for the Arts (among other arts based organizations) which supports, in part, education in schools.

Diminishing the roles of art and music (and physical activity through P.E. classes) is a huge mistake for our nation and for the citizens of our nation. Check out these skills we learn from arts and music, seems like they would be pretty important to common core education...

The research showing the benefits of art and music education far outweigh any negatives critics can scrape up from the bottom of their crap barrels. (You could say I feel very strongly about this.) Check out just a few articles about the importance for each of us to have arts and music education:

The Importance of Art in Child Development

The Benefits of Music Education

Why I Support Art And Music Education In Schools

Comments

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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