Looks like rain

One of the more memorable lunches I have eaten was in the late 1990’s, at the primary school in west London where I taught for ten years. Needless to say, it wasn’t the food that caused the occasion to lodge in my memory, but a very brief, almost unremarkable conversation. Not even a conversation, really, more of a comment - all I can remember are three words. Nonetheless, they were words that prompted me to pause, then to reflect and eventually to spend significant amounts of time thinking about children’s capacity for engaging with the visual world.

The morning had been overcast and, looking out of the window towards the Halal butcher’s across the street, I noticed an almost imperceptible change in the light, as the pale grey sky slightly darkened. It took a fraction of a second for my eyes to adjust, and a few more for my brain to register the implications. Looks like rain. Wet playtime. PE cancelled. Disappointed children. Disappointed children looking for someone to blame for the rain. At that point I heard a voice. ‘Looks like rain.’ Preoccupied by the prospect of an afternoon spent dealing with the frustration of 30 children and the subsequent and inevitable decline of my mental health, I wasn’t quite sure where the voice was coming from. I looked across the table. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Looks like rain,’ the voice repeated. I clearly remember thinking: How do you know? You’re only six.

Lee Gibbs, a pupil in my Year 2 class and the owner of the voice, was teaching me something. Here he was, chewing a potato, looking out of the same window as me and thinking the same thoughts. Until that lunchtime I had firmly believed that it was my art school education, my countless visits to museums and galleries and my years of experience of making art that enabled me to perceive such subtle changes in the visual world as the slight fading of light from a west London sky. Perhaps the truth was that my education and experience had essentially provided me with the means of expressing a response to the visual world, either in words or images. Perhaps most people, children included, were just like me, carrying around in their heads their own visions – visions of perfection, visions of beauty. Perhaps my role as a teacher should be to provide children with opportunities to express these visions. And perhaps teaching art wasn’t just about learning to draw and paint, perhaps it was about learning to see.

‘No PE then,’ Lee said, stabbing a sausage. I cleared my plate away. We could do PE in the hall.