Professional development days often provide opportunities to talk
with colleagues we never normally get the time to sit and talk to at length.
Last Friday I was fortunate to be able to spend the morning with Gerald Melton,
the school art teacher with nearly fifty years of experience under his belt. The
conversation began with a celebration of the resurgence of the importance of the
arts , highlighted by the STEM to STEAM movement but moved on to Gerry’s
observation of a declining skill among a certain population of students that
may have a significant impact on the workforce of the future. I am thrilled to
introduce Gerry as my first guest blogger and invite you to join our
conversation:
With the
current proliferation of personal digital devices, boys are becoming
increasingly lacking in development of their fine motor skills outside the
school art class. During the last half of my 46 years of teaching art to
children of all ages, mainly elementary and middle school, I have noticed a
marked decline in boys’ choosing activities outside of school which require the
practice of fine motor development, or, manual dexterity. Boys, of course, will
continue running, biking, and playing on their own and participating in
organized sports. However, quiet time activities are tending to be spent more
with home computers and hand held electronic devices for entertainment than
with tactile, constructive activities.
A major change
in boys’ dwindling choices of tactile project pastimes is the disappearing
hobby of model building. In the past, building plastic and wooden model planes,
cars, ships, etc. was practiced at some time in the life of the majority of
boys, along with assembling and painting other kinds of kits like soldiers, or board
game pieces. Scratch- building with scraps of wood and junk with a few hand
tools have also long been a part of growing up.
Hobby shops
have almost disappeared along with their plastic models - a ubiquitous product
once regularly found in drugstores, hardware stores, and even grocery stores. In
my art room I have a list of free choice activities for students to do at lunchtime
or between assignments. Along with free
painting, scrap work, and other crafts, the direction to “Bring and construct a
plastic model…” results in the question, “What’s that?” Only one boy has assembled a plastic model
kit in my art room during the last twelve years.
The closest
things to the traditional hobby shop are large stores like Lobby Hobby,
Michael’s and Jo-ann’s. The clientele is mostly female because areas of male
interests cover a relatively small niche in these stores which sell fabric,
scrapbooking, flower arranging supplies, and such.
Girls,
thankfully, continue to be interested in and practice fine motor skills with personal
activities like hair braiding, nail painting, and makeup application, as well
as with hobbies like drawing, painting, beading, and decorating almost any
surface.
With so much
emphasis on attaining academic excellence on standardized tests and the growing
use of electronic media in most subjects, opportunities for students to develop
fine motor, eye-hand coordination by manipulating craft materials outside the
art room are becoming fewer as teachers
of other subjects are pressed for time.
Additionally, lack of art supply money and/ or the avoidance of messes
made are other factors.
Will it become
just a girl thing to practice small motor skills tasks in their formative years
so that the majority of American students who exit high school with capable
manual dexterity in the future will be predominately females? If so, then
surgery, electrical work, and baiting a hook will be mostly “girlie”
activities. Will Nano engineers and Nano
technicians become job categories for females only? How about female dentists only?
something to think about.
gerald melton,
art teacher.
