Well known and loved by Los Angeles school children is a plump, towheaded art teacher named Natalie Robinson Cole. Full of zest and zing, Mrs. Cole likes to break teaching rules, encourages her pupils to break learning rules. Los Angelenos are hocked by her methods, surprised at her results. This summer the remarkable creations of her pupils—mostly Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese—were displayed at progressive teachers' workshops in the U. S., at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Distributed among U. S. teachers this week was a highly readable book, The Arts in the Classroom (John Day; $1.75), in which Mrs. Cole told how she teaches.
Mrs. Cole believes that "children are wonderful," that a teacher's main job is to free them of fears and inhibitions, bring out their natural sense of rhythm and beauty. "Art," says she, "has been emasculated by adult flower arrangers." In teaching her pupils painting, platemaking, block printing, dancing, writing, Mrs. Cole urges them on with the same admonition: "Swing!" Other Coleisms:
> "Children's painting should be big. . . . If painting is a worth-while activity, it is worthy of an 18 in. by 24 in. piece of paper."
> "A good picture is like a birth. It unfolds and is not forced."
> "The teacher should never seek to help a child by taking the brush in hand."
> "Color should be strong, even as life it self is strong."
> "If a child can't make something in the heat of creative enthusiasm, he can do it no good at a warmed-over period."
> "Nothing outstanding is ever accomplished without distraction and confusion."
> "Children love block printing. They love the tarry smell of the sticky ink. They love the rolling and the pressing. The cutting satisfies like whittling on the oldtime school desk."
> "Children's creative writing cannot be judged by such things as punctuation and sentence structure."
Shocking to many a Los Angeles teacher were Mrs. Cole's reports of classroom conversations, of the children's blackboard "newspaper." Excerpts:
> "In our room we have very good intelligent people but by my house there are a lot of drunk men. There is a man called 'The Snake.' He sells liquor. One day he tried to make my father drunk. My mother said, 'Don't the be so dumb. We need the money for rent!' "
> "One day a man called to me and said, 'Do you want some candy?' I told my mother and she said, 'Did you take the candy, Shirley?' And I said, 'I am not so dumb as you think I am mother.' "