2002 - Alice Song Weekly 宋 旻 潔 週 記

Issue:610 Date: 05/02/2002

(12) 大家一起來玩吧！
Let's Play

The air is full of the warm and restless smell of early summer. Instead of the fallen white pear flowers, there are dark and lively green leaves on every pear tree. Green is everywhere, over the hills and fields near the highway, and in the pretty neighborhoods. Every family has started to mow the crazily growing grass, and the smell of new grass is everywhere.

The new quarter began with the coming of spring. After one quarter's training on chalk drawing, we started pencil drawing. I really love the way we do it. Everyone got a photo of oneself and then started to design an art portrait. SLUH boys are very imaginative in this, there are faces in a puzzle, in a nest, in a bottle, broken glasses, flying leaves or even 4-D space! It seemed that we had everything except ordinary faces! My design is considered rather weird: I drew my face on two DNA formed by four ribbons, and my eyes and glasses look like planets on the orbits in the background!

Our art teacher, Ms. Bugnitz, encourages all these. She is the most artist-like person I have ever seen. She has beautiful curly black hair over her shoulders, deep dark eyes and always, a loving, understanding smile. Her classroom is a real art room, there are bunches of books, colorful models, and pairs of eyes looking for art. Ms. Bugnitz said that drawing was not only part of education, it was also a kind of enjoyment and passion. Making up lights and shadows in one's own way really gives us an opportunity to see the daily world in a new perspective. Everything in the art classroom has its own internal perfect sense of beauty. "Just quietly come here, sit down, play with shadows, lights and shape" said Ms. Bugnitz. There is a kind of independence and firmness of this ordinary, unorganized classroom, it gives me a pleasure of focusing and relaxing.

We used to draw over the curtains while sketching and only left a few lights on the models. Then we would start to listen to all kinds of music, jazz, classical. Of course, now we have got one more choice: Chinese classical music.

It is a relaxing and nice enjoyment to go to art class everyday. Also, Ms. Bugnitz will sometimes bring us some cookies. But sometimes we have to guess their
hiding places from chocolate cookies, to dogs with dots, to 101DOGS movie and then found cookies in 101 locker. Dave was the one who got the cookies, but we shared those at last, all come to a happy ending!

To tell the truth, it is impossible to spend 45 minutes every day just drawing many busy students in Nanjing, but the art lesson in NFLS is special too. Everyone will get a turn to give a 40 minutes' lecture in front of the class. Mostly we will choose a subject, make it a PowerPoint or Flash project and show it to the whole class. The choices are various, for instance, religious architecture in Europe, modern industry design. This has become our tradition. Once a student gave a lecture on ancient portrait painting in front of my specialists and professors. A professor of an art institute said he would have the student as his graduate student at once!

But it is actually not a piece of news for students to be 'little teachers', we have duty report time in every English, Chinese, politics and geography class. In my elementary school East Beijing Road Elementary School, we have a TV station run by ourselves, hosts, hostesses, reporters and photographers are all students. They have shows at least once a week. The school flag and song of EBRES are even chose from kids' works. There are many articles talking about American education on Chinese magazines, one of the features we are familiar with is 'learning in happiness'. I really experienced this in Mr. Mills' folding projects, in our social study discussion and in Ms. Bugnitz's classroom.

I can hear Play With It, Have Fun all the time, this has a lot to do with the active spirit of teenagers. Any way, I would say, when we, Chinese kids are doing all these under the title of building up ability and advantage in future competition. We can still relax and play with it. I am really impressed by how American people got out of the tragedy on September 11th, how they showed their happiness and strength in their sports and smiles. Their strongest defense is their passion of rediscovering life. So I hope one day, we, the Chinese children today can say, we did this in games and fun, in happiness, and facing the trouble and hardness, we successfully played with it.