#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

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

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.

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