a peek inside the fishbowl

Excitement about the new painting aside, I spent yesterday feeling pretty miserable.

Emma is in a different school this year. It’s different from her old one and the transition, for the most part, has gone fairly well. But there is one big difference: Testing. The first school had a policy of noncompetitiveness… there were no grades (only comments) on the report cards and there was no testing in the traditional sense. I remember when we kids sat down, with pencil and paper (often under duress!), to answer a series of questions with a time limit of which the outcome was a grade.

The old school didn’t do this. It took Mark and I awhile to get used to this idea. How could they possibly know how the kid is doing? Well, the teacher made an assessment based on assignments (which didn’t get grades), school work, and on what s/he learned about the child in other ways, like talking to them or having them write a story… things like that. The theory was that there are less stressful ways to find out how a kid is doing in school.

The new school is not like that. Their philosophy seems to be the same as when I went to school.

Emma had a quiz about the provinces/territories and their capitals yesterday. I thought she just needed to know the capitals. I spent the week giving her pop-questions. I tried making it fun and low-pressure. i.e. On the way to the park the other night I’d point to her and shout: Saskatchewan!

Turns out we probably shouldn’t have gone to the park, but spent the evening staring at a map of Canada.

Yesterday morning – quiz day – I learned that she needed to know the provinces/territories, capitals AND where they went on a blank map. Oh, and spelling counts. Did I mention they were fairly loosey-goosey with spelling at her old school?

Emma left the house in tears, angry with herself, and it’s entirely my fault.

I had asked her to take a piece of paper and list the provinces* and their capitals. After she was done she read them out to me. She got them all right. Then I asked her to carefully check her spelling against the map while I washed the dishes. By the time I was done I had less than five minutes to look over her work.

I asked her if she had checked her spelling. She says she did. I found a half-dozen spelling mistakes, pointed them out and corrected them for her. While I was doing this I asked her again.

“Are you sure you checked your spelling?”
“Yes.”
“Because I asked you to check letter for letter and it looks like you didn’t.”

Unspoken translation: you did a crappy job. And I expect better.

Hello tears.

Ugh. I still feel terrible. I want to help her without making her feel like an idiot. I tried to sound as upbeat and positive as I could, but clearly it didn’t work.

What I need to do is make sure she has time to study. This studying thing is going to take some getting used to. Study time is different from homework time. When you do homework you just do it and stuff it back into your backpack when you’re done. But when you’re studying you need to find a way to learn the stuff, and make sure it sticks in your head before you’re done. It’s not a matter of do-it-and-be-done-with-it like a row of math questions.

Most importantly, I need to make sure she doesn’t stress about it. She’s only in fourth grade.

Any homework-related tips you could share would be helpful. Me: I need to be better at this homework thing. Gah.

* Here’s a great way to memorize the provinces and territories, from West to East. Imagine a note Nanny wrote her monkey as he was about to visit Queen NaNaNa’s pretty exciting island:

Be A Sweet Monkey On Queen NaNaNa’s
Pretty Exciting Island.
Your NaNny

I can’t stop staring at our new painting. I love it so much.

I have to provide some back story.

The girls and I visited my mother on my birthday back in August. (Hi mom!) We had birthday cake, and she gave me a gift. It was smallish, long and narrow. I tore the paper off to find one of those seven-day plastic pill boxes. You know the kind that helps people remember when to take their meds? Um. Okaaaay. Thanks?

That’s when I noticed that inside each compartment was a crisp $100 bill. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t. But my mother made me, and there I was, with $700 to spend on myself. A lively discussion ensued. What would I do with the money? There were so many things I could do. Take a trip to NYC. Have a spendy day that included new clothes, the spa, and a fancy lunch.  But there really was no question about how I would spend it. I knew deep in my heart that I wanted to buy some original art to hang on our walls.

Coincidentally, the West End Studio Tour (I keep calling it the Westboro Studio Tour) was not too far away. I’d actually been planning on going around to talk to different artists, taking a bunch of photos and turning it all into a big blog post.

Fast forward to last Saturday. I wasn’t sure if we were going to be buying anything. It was important that Mark liked the artwork as well. My main goal was the blog post. If I saw something we liked, it’d be a bonus.

If you’re in Ottawa (especially the Westboro area!) you should really consider checking out the Studio Tour. It is a fantastic way to (a) see what your neighbors are up to (b) support the local art community.

Unfortunately our time was limited, so we only went to a few places.

All of the artists, save one, were showing their work in their homes.

Heather Ballantyne has a series of ephemeral landscapes and cloudy figures. They have this dreamy quality that makes you want to sink your eyeballs into them.

Alison Fowler was our second stop. Her studio is located above Chick Pea Boutique on Richmond Road (a VERY cute place all in itself).

But back to Alison. She is a very talented artist, in fact, here she is!

I liked a lot of her work, but it was a painting of some birch trees (called Early Morning Blue) that really spoke to me. The connection was almost instantaneous. Mark and I both loved the colour and its rich texture. That is what I love about art – all art – its ability to provoke emotion. This painting did it, in spades.

The three of us had a lovely chat, about her art and what people love about art and what is art anyway … I wondered aloud about birches and poppies as a subject and she pointed out a foray into evergreens.

Here is more of her work. Mark and I also liked the longer horizontal piece hanging above the shelf:

These photos really don’t do her work much justice – the layers of colour, the texture, the way she’s captured light and shadow. Frankly, I was much too distracted to take good shots of it, which is ironic considering that’s part of the reason why I was there in the first place:

We lingered, then moved on. We left. And came back. I went all the way back up the stairs, poked my head around the corner with a “we didn’t get very far!” and that’s how Early Morning Blue was bought.

We did see a few other artists. We took in Manju Sah, Paula Mitas Zoubek (I think this was her yard):

… and her birdbath… (great idea with the seashells!):

… and we also stopped at Barb Sohn’s, where I took a secret snap of her lovely living room so ya’ll can see what I saw (I loved her work too):

I am loathe to admit this publicly but part of the reason I enjoy the Studio Tour as much as I do is that I get to see how the artists live. It’s not like I look in their medicine cabinets, but it is an interesting peek nonetheless.

After we were done we rushed over to the Ottawa Bagelshop (why, why, do they insist on displaying all the chocolates where the little people can access them so easily ??) :

… and then went on our merry way.

I’ve had a day for the art to settle in to its new home. I’m had more time to admire it at different times of the day. I still love it. What I don’t love is the fact that our dining room needs a coat of paint. And I can’t decide upon a colour.

We’re done buying art for a long time, but you should know that the Studio Tour also runs next weekend, September 20-21. So go! You won’t be disappointed you did. And thanks mom, for funding my art collection. :)

Art! No one guessed, although I didn’t really expect anyone to get it. :) We bought this painting from Alison Fowler, an Ottawa-based artist. It’s called Early Morning Blue. Eeep! I’m so thrilled.

I’ll write more about it, and her, and the Westboro Studio tour, and the fact that we need to repaint our dining room, tomorrow, when I have more time and energy to dwell. I’m just too pooped. G’night!