WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT

Ottawa is a fun city. Actually, we love all Canadian cities.  Come to think of it, we really like Canada.  As in it would be a reasonable place to live.  But I digress.

We just spent  a few days in Ottawa.  After parking the car, practically the first urban scene that I am presented with is the photo above.  I almost couldn’t believe it.

There they were, sitting on the sidewalk drawing street musicians.  They were all identically equipped with drawing slates, drawing paper clipped to the slate, and Staedtler Mars Lumograph drawing pencils (a Transparent Drawing favorite).  Although it looks from the photo that some of they were distracted, there were a lot of pencil marks on most of their papers.  So they were focusing on the task at hand.  And almost everyone has a hat.

This is what learning is supposed to look like.  This is what fundamental knowledge acquisition looks like.  A core educational setting in which the students are drawing.  This is the way it is supposed to be.  They are not sitting there writing paragraphs.  They are drawing and internalizing.  They are learning and processing with a pencil and piece of paper.  And early in their educational careers.

I wonder how often they do this.  If it like most typical educational settings, it is likely this is a rare occurrence.  Still, this is Canada, not the US.  So I’d like to think that they draw like this every day.  And I’d like to think that their drawings are given the same educational and cultural weight as any written story they might do.

After all, this is Canada.