An Educating Summer

In my last couple of days at the museum before I go back to school, I volunteered rather masochistically to prepare our art supplies for the coming fall season. This means sharpening pencils and colored pencils and disinfecting markers while discarding the old and broken for the fresh and pristine (just after typing this I trashed four stubby inch-long pencils that have probably seen better days). Not only is this noisily endearing me to all my coworkers, it's also a bit tedious (we make a lot of art!) But I'm actually really enjoying it. Not only is it consistently satisfying to see the tip of a pencil become pointed and ready for use by some young artist, it's also feeding my nerdy love for school supplies.

This week I've definitely got education on the brain. But not just the type of education that takes place in a K-12 classroom--I'm talking about what goes on in the education departments of art, history and science museums everywhere.

Part of the reason I took this internship is that I knew I was interested in museum work and had taken classes in art, history and the ideology of museums. But I wanted a real-world experience to see how this one specific cog in the machine of the museum works. As it turns out, I love the emphasis on interactive learning and public outreach in museum education. Most of all, though, and even though we have lots of programming for adults, I love working with kids. One day after a Creating Together class where we looked at Rockwell portraits in the gallery and then drew self-portraits with chalk (one of our messiest projects), I was helping a little girl who was about four years old wash her hands with soapy water. Her mom turned to me and said, “if you haven’t thought about becoming a teacher, you definitely should.” Well, now I’m considering a career in museum education, with this hands-on summer experience to thank.

I'll post again on Thursday, which is my last day--but after that, I'm heading off into the sunset (which is to say my senior year of college). Here's a little doodle I did today in our Summer Sketch club, where we were cartooning up a storm: