Tag / literature

by Nathan Coumbe

Creating Football Fans

There are two components to learning a subject:

  1. You must want to learn whatever the subject is.
  2. You must constantly engage with the subject until it becomes a part of you.

This is how die-hard football fans (and players) are made. We don’t give them a textbook and test them on all the information it contains – we create an environment where a person wants to learn about the sport, and then we expose them over and over again until it becomes a part of his or her identity.

How do we replicate this in a classroom? How can we create people, children and adults, obsessed with learning something other than sports?

We’ve gotten really good at creating a culture obsessed with football; we’ve done a poor job of creating a culture obsessed with history, literature, or science.

by Nathan Coumbe

Be my eyes, Harry!

I’m on a Harry Potter kick, it seems, but I love well-written literature…I can’t help it. When I was reading the other night, I was struck with the thought of how Harry serves as the “eyes” of us non-magic folk in discovering the wonderful world J.K. Rowling crafted for us. Instead of telling us a story, she let us live it out through Harry.

Think about it – had Harry grown up in a magical household, the Harry Potter series would have been quite boring to read. For instance, remember the first time in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Harry (and us, the readers) hears about “splinching”, a situation in which part of a witch or wizard is left behind when they disappear from one place and reappear in another? Had Harry been brought up with this rather common knowledge, in the wizarding world at least, Arthur Weasley would not have explained it to him, which allowed us to learn about it by extension. J.K. Rowling would instead have had to break from the story, become a narrator, and say something along the lines of, “Oh by the way, reader, ‘splinching’ is…” By writing Harry as a newcomer to the wizarding world, one character explains it to another character, and we as readers never have to come out of the magic that occurs when we lose ourselves in an excellent story.

Rowling crafted a useful literary tool into her story by using Harry as the window into the world of magic, rather than simply telling us a story. It’s never too late to appreciate an artist’s ingenuity.

by Nathan Coumbe

Stop telling people to avoid the arts

How many of us have told someone that she should choose a real major, one that is applicable in today’s job market, rather than pursue something creative like art, music, or literature?

(RAISES HAND)

Why do we do this? It is well-meaning enough, I suppose: we don’t want them to struggle financially, we don’t want them to fail, we don’t want them to get hurt because it is so hard to live as an artist…

Let’s just stop, shall we?

What if the person to whom you gave this advice is actually quite talented as a writer? What if she has spent so much of her free time drawing, painting, and sculpting that she has become a fantastic artist? Do you really feel comfortable telling her that she should go get her MBA, work in middle management, collect her benefits, get the 401(k) match, and just worry about “all that artsy stuff” in her off hours, because she can’t make real money in the arts? Why is that good advice (especially when that last claim is bogus)?

Handle Money. Fail often.

Why don’t we teach her instead? Let’s make sure that we are teaching our children how to handle their finances, how to live on a budget, spend less than they make, save money, make money, and how to avoid debt at all cost (this is the real reason so many of us starve these days). We should most definitely teach her not to go $100,000 in student loan debt for her MFA in painting, but that does not mean we should tell her not to pursue her passion – those are not the same thing.

At the same time, we should also be teaching her to fail and fail often. Have her start trying to sell her art online. That doesn’t work? Should we tell her that she should quit and go get a real job? No! You don’t tell a child to stop trying to ride a bike because she fell off and scraped her knee; you tell her to get up and encourage her to try again.

Do the same thing with your creative child or friend. Encourage her start teaching other people what it is that she knows. She can make online videos of her work so that others can see it and her ideas will spread. Find whatever avenue works for her.

Encourage

There has never been a better time to be an artist than today – the market is wide open, the possibilities are limitless. You can be an artist in anything at which you are talented; it does not have to be a traditional “art”. Let’s focus on teaching our family and friends the right skills they need to survive and thrive – let’s teach creativity, leadership, personal finance, marketing and storytelling. Then let’s send them forth to pursue that which they most truly enjoy.

If we can teach them to handle money well, and to learn and grow from failure, they will all be fine.

We will all be just fine.