The Mysterious Spinning Machine
Bobby Ann Starnes
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.
The 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 me, 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. The 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. The 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. The 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?
We asked the children about the spinner -- that was always our first step in trying to figure something out. Either they couldn't articulate it, didn't care to share their ideas, or offered Katrina's "my brain told me." Unable to gain insight from the children, we had to try to make sense of it ourselves. So we wondered, we talked, we worried, and still we were baffled. Indeed, I was anxiety ridden, as I am prone to be. Had the students been seduced by the dark side of the Force? With stinging guilt, I wondered: Had I stunted their thinking by bringing the awful contrivance into the school? Should we put it away so the children would return to more innovative thinking? "After all," we told each other, "spin painting is using a lot of paper." There were the trees to think of.
So, hoping to understand the spinner's attraction, we watched the children for an hour, pulling and stretching our minds as far and in as many directions as we could. Mary's eyes fixed on the spinner, and, as it scattered paint on another paper destined for the trash, she finally said it. "You know, there has to be some reason they are using the spinner so much. It must be meeting some need. Maybe we don't need to know more than that."
"Maybe not," I agreed with a defeated sigh.
The spinner remained in the creation area until it finally gave out. The children continued to use it right up until it took its last spin, but Mary and I stopped worrying. We decided to trust that, whether or not they understood why they were so fascinated with it, and even though we couldn't understand, something the children needed to figure out compelled them to use the device. We knew they would move on when they figured out whatever problems they had posed for themselves.
I was telling this story to a friend not long ago. My son Huck was in the kitchen frying up his special tortillas. When he heard me say that I couldn't understand the attraction, he rushed out of the kitchen. Rapidly waving a spatula at me, he said, "I'll tell you why I loved that spinner!"
"Good grief," I thought, "the mere mention of that darn spinner gets him as excited today as it did 21 years ago." Because Huck attended our little school for the nine years it operated, he is often a source of insight into the experiences we had there. Today would be an especially good lesson for me.
"I'm not sure why the other kids loved it," he continued, "but I was always experimenting to see if I could figure out how to replicate designs. I did it over and over trying to understand the variables and how to control them." With great detail, Huck recounted some of the theories he had developed and how each had moved him closer to his goal.
I was astonished. The spinner that Mary and I had thought was mindless had given rise to intense mental activity. The fact that we could not see it did not alter that.
Mary and I had been troubled because so often imagination and creativity were (and are) perceived as traits of an elite group -- dancers, musicians, sculptors, actors. But we knew that all children were creative, not just a special few. So we never tried to make the students creative; they already were. We wanted to help them to become powerful and confident thinkers and doers, to have the confidence to follow their own ideas, and to listen to and celebrate their uniqueness. And we believed that what they learned in the creation area had an impact on their ability to learn math and science, social studies and health, reading and writing. We also thought it helped them get along with people who were different from themselves, to cooperate and share, and to constantly ask themselves important questions: What next? How can I link these seemingly unrelated items to understand why Roger Williams founded Rhode Island? To understand the causes and effects of the Civil War? To use simple machines? To write a stronger story?
Try as we might, none of us can ever really understand another's thinking or learning processes. It is just too complex. So we have to be vigilant in talking with students about their ideas and how they make meaning. And when we've tried our best to understand and can't, in the end, we have to trust that learners have reasons. Maybe they can't articulate them, and maybe we can't understand them, but they do have reasons.
I was and am a neurotic soul, so even looking back, I'm glad Mary and I wondered and worried. I'm glad we decided not to intervene. I'm glad we trusted the children to know -- at least on some level -- what they were trying to figure out. As for that machine, I know it served exactly the right purpose, but I admit that, at some place in my heart, I still can't help being glad the darn thing broke.
BOBBY ANN STARNES is founding president
of the National Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning
and a member of the teacher preparation faculty at Montana State
University Northern, Havre (thecenter@onewest.net).
This column and the one that ran in October were adapted from
The Active Learner.
