QUILTING MATH: A+ Director Annette Butler listens to Helena KIPP student Ariel Bland talk about his composition.
BRIAN CHILSON
GOING FOR AN
A+
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JANUARY 9, 2013
MODEL PUTS ART IN ACADEMICS, KIDS IN THE MOOD TO LEARN. BY LESLIE NEWELL PEACOCK
I
BRIAN CHILSON
PAUL LEOPOULOS: He saw what art did for his daughter, Thea.
THEA FOUNDATION’S TEACHING
ARKANSAS TIMES
n a sixth-grade math class in the Delta, students are making quilts. They’re cutting squares from colorful patterned paper and folding them to make triangles or rectangles. They’ve measured the squares to make sure they’re 3 inches on a side, because if they don’t make their squares right, the quilt will be off. They’re alternately laughing and concentrating, filling a larger square with their shapes to create their own designs. When they get a bit rowdy, Annette Butler claps her hands three times and the kids stop and clap back. Things settle down again. A reporter asked a grinning young man after he finished his work what he’d gotten from the activity. “I think I got a 100!” That would be an A+ — which also happens to be part of the name of the method that Arkansas A+ program director Butler was demonstrating. This student, enrolled in Arkansas’s newly revived A+ schools network, had learned how to measure, the importance of accuracy, some geometry and how to follow instructions on the board properly, but he wasn’t fed the information. He hadn’t been given a fill-in-the-
blank work sheet, but paper full of possibilities. He created art that incorporated the answers to what is a square, what is a rectangle, how many do I need to fill a larger square. And then he exulted, I did this right! The A+ method of arts-infused education, being promoted by the Thea Foundation in North Little Rock, puts the art in math, the drama in literature, the song in history, and has a proven record of raising test scores, improving discipline and heightening student and teacher satisfaction. Thea Director Paul Leopoulos is convinced of its ability to turn around Arkansas’s struggling schools and enriching its high-achieving ones, and he’s been knocking on the door of the state Department of Education for years trying to spread the word. A couple of months ago, the door opened a bit, when educators in the department’s Learning Services Division gave an audience to Leopoulos and John Brown of the Windgate Foundation, which initiated an A+ pilot program in Arkansas in 2003. Laura Bednar, the Education Department’s associate commissioner for learning services, wasn’t able to attend that meeting because of