The Mysterious Spinning Machine

Abstract

MARY CROTTY, my co-teacher, and I stood off to the side of the creation area that day and watched. We had a serious decision to make, and we needed information before we made it. Our little school always had a large creation area filled with all kinds of interesting materials. Of course, there were the standard paints, paste, scissors, and the rest of the general supplies. But most of the area's shelves were filled with shiny paper, yarn, Popsicle sticks, wire scraps, egg cartons, and anything else students might find intriguing. We always marveled at the novel ways they found to use paper-towel rolls, small boxes, styrofoam meat trays, corks, empty spools, and other pieces of precious junk. A seemingly endless stream of inventions emerged from the area - toilet-paper superheroes, Coke- bottle airplanes, shoebox cameras, 3-D collages, wire sculptures, speedboats, helicopters, and on and on. children took great pride in their creations. I still smile when I remember the day 5-year-old Katrina painstakingly cut around an intricately interwoven painting of brilliant oranges, yellows, and greens and carefully mounted it on white paper. She usually displayed her work with no title. But on that day, she gently tapped her pudgy little index finger on my shoulder as I finished my work with one of her classmates. When she had my full attention, she placed the masterpiece in front of pointed authoritatively to a spot on the mounting, and asked me to write the title right there. I obliged, carefully writing The Sneezing Painter at the precise spot she designated. That title, alongside the painting, created quite a vivid image. The Sneezing Painter? I asked myself. What connections had she made in her thinking to go from the blob of color to a sneezing painter? I asked her to tell me about it, but Katrina was a woman of few words. My brain just told me, she said, skipping away to hang her masterpiece. Visitors usually thought the creation area was designed to provide opportunities for the creative kids to ply their skills. students thought it was for fun. But Mary and I had other ideas. To us, the creation area's job was to encourage learners to engage in rigorous, disciplined thinking, to exercise innovation and imagination, and to explore their novel thoughts. After all, turning a Pepsi bottle, paper- towel rolls, and corks into a spaceship required a lot of the designer. And the ability to look at a cotton ball and see a puff of smoke coming out of the toilet-paper-roll exhaust pipe is not so much art as it is a demonstration of the power of imagination. Mary and I were envious of the students' powers - when we looked at a cotton ball, all we saw was a cotton ball. Three weeks before Mary and I stood watching the children that day, I found a paint spinner at a flea market. You've probably seen them. You put a piece of paper on the spinner, turn it on, and, as it whizzes around in circles, you drop paint onto the paper. paint is dispersed around the paper. Turn the spinner off and you've got abstract art. Pretty mindless stuff, I told myself as I placed the contraption on the shelf. It won't hold their interest long. I was wrong. children loved the spinner. Each morning before school - and at any opportunity during the day - they crowded around it waiting their turns to give it still another mindless whirl. We had a gallery in the hallway where each child could display favorite work. In the classroom each child had an additional 3' x 3' personal display area. And the children took sharing their work seriously, thoughtfully changing their display areas as new creations, stories, or pieces of work excited them. These spinner paintings never ended up on display; they were seldom taken home at the end of the day. In fact, the spin art almost always ended up in the trash. That's what confused Mary and me. If the paintings meant so little to them, and if the activity was so mindless, what compelled the students to spend so much time on them? …