There are many things we can do without thinking. Some of those things we can do because we have done them so many times that they have become automatic. We rely on muscle memory to perform the task. An example of this is brushing our teeth. We weren’t born knowing how to do it, we didn’t need to know. As toddlers, however, we were taught to do it first by observing and having others do it for us. Then we began to try for ourselves, crudely at first, but by the time our milk teeth began to fall out we had a good enough grasp of the task to be able to protect our new adult ones. As adults we barely give it any thought at all. It’s routine. Other movements we just feel. I don’t dance with my husband terribly often. We go to a wedding or some other formal event about once a year these days. Still, nobody had to teach me how to dance with him. It just works- it always has, from the first time. If I were to dance with someone else it may not come so easily, but because I have known my husband since he was thirteen years old, a lot of things just come naturally from knowing who he is and who we are together.
Sometimes it is the process and not the final product that the artist is trying to convey. The sculptors discussed in the chapter revealed that it was a very physical experience to create a piece. They referred not simply to the act of adding to or removing from their medium, but the way they had to use their bodies in order to feel what it was they were trying to express. Dance is a physical experience already, but when I am learning new choreography and my instructor asks if we want to try it with the music or without, my response is always with. The steps don’t fully come together for me until I feel how they interact with the music. I can know the steps, but it is the music that will tell me how to perform them.
I had not thought of empathizing in such a physical way before reading this chapter. I always described empathizing as seeing a situation from someone else’s point of view. I hadn’t considered that it also means imagining what it is like to actually be someone else. This year my son has a boy in his class who is new to the school and who has some learning disabilities. Some of his behaviors have made it difficult for him to make friends with the other students. We have had many conversations about what it would feel like to come to a new school and how important it is that he has at least one friend, even if it is challenging sometimes. I was in the room last week for their Halloween party and got to observe him a bit and noticed some of his ticks. Over the weekend I had my kids try to perform classroom tasks while imitating some of the involuntary body movements that this student goes through. They tried to read while bobbing their heads and tried to write while their arms were jerking. We talked at length about how frustrating that would be and why putting that much effort into tasks that everyone else seems to do so easily might make someone act out. My kids had many other examples of struggles that students go through and how it may affect their school experience.
Toward the end of the chapter the authors point out that part of empathizing is thinking about what a person (or atom) wants. My son who is concerned that this boy doesn’t complete his assignments because he doesn’t want to realized that it may not be that he doesn’t want to. Perhaps he just wants to be able to do it as easily as other students can.
Poetry is rarely a physical experience for the reader. The author of a poem, however, may have to live an experience as the sculptors in the chapter did in order to write about it authentically. In order to express an experience in words you must first know exactly how it feels. I like the idea of having my students write a poem about an animal. In order to do that I would like them to have an experience similar to the one I had for the Zoom In assignment for this module. I would like the students to “be” that animal for a bit and make some observations about what they see and feel. I think this will bring a lot of useful information to our poetry unit.
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