Allowing Myself To Be Their Student

Faig Ahmed, hand-woven textile

When our daughter Josephine was born, we lived in an apartment in downtown Seattle, a block away from the famed Pike Place Public Market. One of the reasons we loved living downtown was that we could walk everywhere and that included her, at first in her bassinet stroller and then on her own two feet.

One of our regular destinations was the Seattle Art Museum. Museums are notoriously dull for young children, especially when adults march them through the exhibits, one-gallery-at-a-time, urging them to look at this one or that one, and peppering them with questions with the idea of making the experience "educational. And I get it. We adults have paid good money, made the effort, and it seems like an incredible waste when the kids start begging to leave after 10 minutes of riding the escalators. After a couple of experiences like this, instead of giving up, we had the idea of purchasing a family membership so that we could pop in and out at will. It turned out to be a genius move. Now, the pressure was off. Josephine could say, "I want to see the painting of Jesus whacking those guys" (an actual reference she made to a medieval painting of Jesus driving the money lenders from the temple) and we were free to do just that: walk to the museum, look at that one painting, then leave without feeling any sense of having wasted even a second.

This simple move of an annual membership allowed us to let Josephine lead the way. I wasn't Teacher Tom back then, but just a father whose wanted, for reasons not yet clear to me, his child to be free to just explore. And her instinct was to walk fast, treating the galleries like a kind of maze, pointing and remarking, but only pausing briefly before moving on. Without the pressure of getting value for my money, I found I could relax and just follow her, figuring that at least she was getting a bit of exercise, because it sure didn't seem like she was engaging with the art. We would walk round-and-round, ending up back where we started, then plunge back in to do it again. 

I've probably visited this Albert Bierstadt painting, Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, a hundred times. This photo can't do it justice, but if you click it, you will see it a bit larger. I feel like this is my painting.

Looking back, I can see how wrong I was. She was, in fact, fully engaging with the art. She was starting with the architecture. 

We would sometimes spend a half hour just motoring through the space, mapping it, noticing the windows, the balconies, finding the elevators and bathrooms, riding the escalators, saying hello to staffers, and only then, only once we knew our way around, would she say something like, "I want to find that silly painting." She would then lead us directly to it, like finding a landmark while traveling through a strange land.

With the lay of the land firmly in mind, Josephine would then often crawl onto a bench, where we would sit to ponder whatever art was within view. I specifically remember a piece by Cindy Sherman, a self-portrait in which she portrayed a queen on a throne. My memory of the specifics is fuzzy after all these years, although I recall it as a somewhat unsettling image. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, over the next few months we visited it a half dozen times. What fascinated Josephine was that this queen, this woman in a puffy, fancy dress, was apparently looking at something off the edge of the canvas. What was she looking at? Josephine was convinced that she was looking at her baby girl and that she was sad that her baby girl wasn't sitting on her lap. She would then tell stories about that baby and why it wasn't with her queen mommy, conjuring exactly the kind of introspection and wonder that every artists hopes to evoke.

Another time, I had made efforts to steer her away from a particularly macabre artwork that featured a dissembled woman's body on a collection of video screens. I thought I had been successful, until Josephine declared, "I want to find those TVs." And sure enough, she led me right to it. I was prepared for her to be frightened, but instead she stood laughing at the absurdity, a response so genuine that it completely shifted my own perspective on the piece.

This experience of following a toddler's lead taught me how to not just appreciate art museums, but to love them. To this day, I'm the guy you see either buzzing through the galleries or sitting on a bench. Never do I slowly and systematically making my way through as if ticking off boxes. But more importantly, it was one of my first lessons in letting a child lead me, of trusting young children to know how and what to learn, and, indeed, allowing myself to be their student.

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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