Good Asian Drivers Music Video

Here's a "5 minute music video focusing on female empowerment, feminism," featuring mostly people of color.

The group's name is The Good Asian Drivers

My 2 pairs of Running shoes

Saucony Triumph 5 >

Brooks Ghost

Another Saturday morning. Another Race

Just finished the ATC Decatur-Dekalb YMCA 4 mile run today. Lovely facility, plenty of parking, great signage and traffic control.

The Atlanta Track Club did a great job organizing this low-key, no T-shirt event. I haven't run more than a couple of miles in two weeks so I was hurting a bit during the 2nd and 3rd mile. Gotta work on my endurance. Had trouble breathing considering that the temperature and humidity were pretty mild this morning. There were some long hills too. I was surprised to hear 8:23 as I passed the first mile marker, guess I started out a little too fast. I was thinking of going around a 10:00 pace. The next mile was also under 9 minute. I tensed up and felt some tightness around the 3rd mile. The 4th mile was fairly flat, I thought I ran smoothly. Just needed to relax and control my breathing a little better during the middle parts. I was able to sprint the last 50 yards or so to finish in under 35 minutes which was my goal for this race. My time was 34:55 so I did all right, I guess. I had fun, learned something, and finished strong. So I will take this experience and apply it to my next run. The most important thing is that I enjoyed myself with my first ever 4 mile race today.

NYC trip

We were on vacation in New York City this past week.

The last time I visited NYC was 1992, I was driving a van full of sound equipment from Portland, Maine and delivered them to a musician who lived in Midtown. I also came to NY the previous year to interview for a job in New Jersey and stayed one night at a hostel in a YMCA. That was my first experience with Port Authority. I didn't get that job and went back to San Diego, but got the job at Portland Stage Company in Maine the next year.

Wow, almost 20 years has passed, how quickly time flies, especially as we get older.

My wife and I did all the usual touristy stuff: Times Square, Empire State Bldg, MOMA, museums, restaurant row, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Theater district, and Central Park. It seemed like we walked at least 5,6 miles every day which was great exercise after eating all the amazing food that was everywhere.

It was a complete sensory overloading experience with the sights, sounds, smells, people, cars, products on the sidewalks, Broadway shows, restaurants and shops. We managed to spend about 4 hours in Central Park, where I ran one loop around this Jackie Onasis Reservoir in about 14 minutes (1.57 mile). It was nowhere as hot or humid as Georgia so I felt great so we walked some more. New York City (or at least Manhattan as I remembered it) is more diverse, vibrant, clean and safer than ever. I would not want to live or drive here. The Subway was great to get around to wherever we need to go, why would you need to drive and park with the ridiculously high rates and the reckless driving. We even made it down to the Village, SoHo and the NYU area. Another week would not be enough to see every thing, but we enjoyed ourselves in the Big Apple and are ready to head back to our humble mellow lives in the little town of Smyrna, Jo Ja.

My 3 Rules for Running

1. Relax.

2. Breathe.

3. Listen to your body.

Post-It Notes Stop Motion

DEADLINE ( A Project for SCAD) Impressive!!! Cool Sounds too.

Another one bites the dust, and another one....

Hitler finds out MJ has died. What? MJ died again?

Atlanta 10K Peachtree Road Race

This is the largest 10K in the U.S. with 55,000 people registered.

Really, is there another 10K race anywhere else in the world that's bigger?

I ran my second 10K race ever and finished with an official time of 1:09:33. I guess I expected the slow pace with so many people in my time group. I was hoping for around 60 minutes flat but the whole 6.2 miles was bottlenecked and crowded from beginning to end. I finally found my rhythm the last mile and a half and I practically sprinted to the finish line. The weather was decent with unusually low humidity (60%) considering this is Georgia in July. It was about 75 degrees and sunny at 8:30 AM.

Mile 1: I was in the last time group, my number was in the 90,000s. The winners have already arrived an hour before our group even got moving. I was taking it all in, trying to relax with all the noise around me: announcements, radio stations live broadcasting, live bands playing, TV coverage, helicopters flying above and the crowds yelling on top of all the cacophony. "Beat It" was pumping from one of the stages. Later I thought I should have worn the white glove on one hand for MJ. Closed my eyes for a second of reflection. We crossed the starting line with the giant American flag flying above Lenox mall around 8:58. We were all walking for about 100 yards. I was trying hard to avoid stepping on the heels of people in front of me.

Mile 2: I was in the midst of 10,000 walkers/joggers/runners/talkers. Some guy was talking loudly on his cell phone next to me. It seems like I was running in place for about 15 minutes. I was weaving around slower runners and walkers and people talking on their Blackberries or iPhone. Seriously, now. I took my first cup of water on the left sidewalk. There was a holy water spray station at the Cathedral of St. Philip on the right side. The water felt great on my backside. I glanced at my stopwatch 25:09. Ridiculous, man! A kid ran past me on the right side and I followed him. All of a sudden he stopped dead in his tracks, I braked abruptly to avoid running into him and swerved around him. Dang kids, I should have known.

Mile 3: Jogging pace now, still way too slow but I'm enjoying some blues band playing on the right sidewalk. "American Woman, Get away from me..." I skipped the water station and marched on, preparing for "Cardiac Hill" or as some local runners call it "HeartBreak Hill". It was not that bad but some older folks were huffing and puffing in front of Piedmont Hospital, which is close to the top of the hill. There were even more walkers now. I see another SuperMan and a few more WonderWoman with their completed capes and wigs. Uncle Sams were everywhere too. I saw some Clark Howard headbands on the ground, actually lots of them. I found out later that he was running in my time group and was giving out free headbands for everyone.

Mile 4: I stopped briefly to get some watermelon slices and water from the Whole Foods/ West Stride running store tent. I got an instant boost of energy and started to pick up the pace hoping to make up for the previous 3 miles. I am now beginning to RUN at my comfortable pace. There were still too many people walking on the left side of the road. I decided to run on the yellow dividing lines in the middle of Peachtree Street. There were a few older men walking or slow motion running-if you know what I mean. More water sprays and kids were shooting water cannons into the crowd. I was wondering where were the beer and doughnuts people talked about when we get to this point. A cold refreshing adult beverage would be awesome right about now, I thought...

Mile 5: "It's all downhill from here!" Some wise guy yelled from the sidewalk. I begin to see some showoff runners with the coveted Peachtree 2009 T-shirts running back in the opposite direction. Yeah, we get it, you finished it Mister BigShot. There were three guys wearing coconut bikini tops and grass skirts. Aloha. Cat in the Hat was down the road. I passed a woman wearing the top half of her wedding dress with the tiara and veil. I passed the Woodruff Arts Center and out of the corner of my eye I saw my wife standing there on the curb across from Colony Square with a confused look. I stopped abruptly and U-turned back to meet her. She had been there since 8:30-for more than an hour . She took the picture of me above and I told her "One more mile, see you at the finish line."

Mile 6.2: The homestretch. I was booking. "Yes, I am going to make it !" I took the sharp left turn with a sprint. I am now focused on staying straight down the middle of the road. I remembered passing a ton of people down 10th St. and swinging my arms furiously almost sprinting full speed as I passed the finish line. Whoooooeeeee, that was fun. I felt awesome and energized like I could run another 6 miles. CONGRATULATIONS, dude!!!!

I grabbed a bottle of water and my T-shirt bag and thanked one of the volunteers for helping as she was wishing me a Happy Fourth.

CLICK HERE to WATCH the AJC PEACHTREE ROAD RACE TIMELAPSE MOVIE

Doggone it. Finally!!!

Da Fitness Plan

OK, today I joined the 100 PushUps Club.

Soon, I will also be doing the 200 Sit ups plan.

Go to http://hundredpushups.com/ if you want to join.

The goal is to be able to do 100 pushups consecutively and 200 situps in a row. Yeah, sounds ambitious I know. BodyAche City here I come!

Armageddon is coming! Look Busy.

The world must be coming to an end soon. Maybe this Fourth of July. According to some tabloids, not that I read any of them.

OK I saw something about it on E! The Soup yesterday.

Hopefully it won't end before I finish my second Peachtree Road Race-probably around 10 AM or so on next Saturday. This race might be the world's biggest 10K in terms of raw number of runners- 55,000 this year. I'm looking forward to it, I've been training for the last 10 weeks. My goal is to just finish the dang thing in an hour, which is about a 10:00/mile pace.

Nuke Newt the Lizard

Jon & Kate Plus 8 = TrainWreck x 10

Parkour. Love it!

Tips for Running form

...and the livin' is EZ

My mom left Tuesday after spending a week here with us in Georgia. She's now in St. Louis visiting with my aunt #3 and her family.

While she was here, we went to the Botanical Garden, Stone Mountain, dim sum at Canton House in Buford Hwy, and my personal fave all-you-can-eat restaurant Golden Corral.

This picture made me laugh because she is now boycotting everything *Made in China. She won't shop at Wal-Mart anymore because almost everythin' there is cheap plastic crap made in C***a. She would look at the labels of cans, boxes, containers, wrappers, bags and if they say Made in china, she would give that "No, I'm disgusted!" look and refuse to buy the item.

Oh what a beautiful morning

Today was a great day for running. Temperature's about 65 degrees this morning, I ran 6.4 miles in an hour or so. Felt pretty good afterwards, I could have ran another mile. This is the most miles I've ran in a day since the Peachtree Road Race in 2001. The real P'Tree Roadrace is in 4 weeks.

Running blogs

Found some Cool blogs about running by runners:

 

One is Life Isn't Over at 40

Another great one is RunnerDude

This one is really kewl RunningSuperFans

Go Buh Bye

God Bless everyone, NO exceptions.

Dr. George R. Tiller (1941-2009)- was a real American Hero for  millions of people around the world.  If you think that abortion is murder then why not prosecute everyone involved with the "murders" of the fetuses including the women.  Why not?

                    Six billions miracles are enough. 

           Guns don't kill people,  anti-abortion pro-lifers do.

 

Boys and girls, I present to you the GOP agenda:

     Abortion-No,

  

     Death Penalty-Yes, 

     War-Yes, 

     Torture-Yes

     Killing doctors-Yes

Note to self:  Check out this new book by Frank Schaeffer: Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back

On the road again, part deux

Today I ran 5.15 miles in under 46 minutes which is about a 9 minute/ mile pace.  Hey, looks like 8 minute mile is possible after all. I stopped for water a couple of times so that will probably shaved off a couple of minutes right there.  This week I ran a total of 19 miles.

Started out a little faster than ususal, but I finished strong and could probably run another mile with not much of a problem.  I was feeling great when I arrived back at West Stride that I wanted to keep running but decided to stop and stretch.  This "runner's high" is real, man!

At the nutrition seminar afterwards, I learned about the importance of eating carbs or drinking some Carb/Protein/Sports drink within a half hour window after finish your run.  We went and got some Accelerade- a powdered mix sports drink like Gatorade.  A little pricy but I wanted to try it out.  Oh, and Coffee and caffeine is actually GOOD for athletes, in moderation and in general.  About portion, on your plate you should have one half of fruits/veggies, one quarter carbs, and one quarter protein.  Sounds logical and sensible to me.  

Hobo from Hoboken, New Jersey

What's the deal with the kids calling each other HOBO all of a sudden?  Did they just learn about hobos, drifters,  or vagabonds in one of their social studies units?  One of them even asked me if I am a hobo!  

Of course I was a former hobo- a proud gypsy in my past career.  I even lived in my car for one weekend.  When I was growing up, we moved all the time.  We stayed in one city maximum 2 years.  The longest was 5 years at UC Santa Cruz for me.  Then of course the show  business life with its ups and downs and my jobs as freelance sound tech and designing for the theater.  Ahhh, life in the theater, I could write a book about my 13 years in the theater business.  May be another day.

Theme for our next staff meeting

I Heart Torture

Peace out Mofo!

"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."

Albert Einstein

I'm an awesome babysitter. I mean teacher.

I mean BE INSPIRING

On the road again...

I've been running again the last three weeks.
Today I ran about 4 miles in under 40 minutes in West Buckhead. This is the third week of the Peachtree RoadRace in training program at West Stride running store. The first few weeks we ran about 3 miles at an easy pace. Last week I got my first real running shoes at the store-Saucony Triumph 5 for 100 bucks. FUNCTION, FIT, FEEL, 'FORDABILITY (and of course fashion).
Wow, these shoes made a BIG difference in my comfort, speed and stability. I was able to run longer and more comfortable this past week. My goal is to finish the Peachtree 10K race this year in under an hour, a little faster than my last Peachtree, which was in 2001.

More of Jonquil Festival

Kathy, in front of the Smyrna Community Center where we got married 10 years ago.

I got Swine on the brain

Depeche Mode 25 years later

This is the new single from the new Depeche Mode's CD "Sounds of the Universe".
Wrong is the song. It is growing on me, I found myself humming the tune out of nowhere, like some other classic DM from the 80's. Oh yeah, was a fan, I saw them 25 years ago in San Francisco. My first year in college at UC Santa Cruz, I drove a couple of people from my dorm hall in a little Ford Fiesta. That car died fittingly on my last month of college in 1989.

Song Lyrics | Depeche Mode lyrics

It's a badass awesome video. Love the sounds effects!!!
For some reason I can't embed the video , but go to this site http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/DepecheMode%2FWrong--208574489;_ylt=AgTTavcUkcnfbi448BL2AsLesyUv

Another memorable song is Jezebel-the only one sung by Martin L. Gore. This song is sticking in my head.
Bossa Nova??? this is a first for Depeche Mode!

Five Favorite NBA players

Here my all time favorite most underrated basketball players, in no particular order:

1) Manu Ginobili
2) Scottie Pippen
3) Robert Horry
4) George Gervin (the Iceman)
5) Tony Parker

None of them are playing in the NBA playoffs as of today, now that the San Antonio Spurs are eliminated.

Gelato! Soldiers make a living by dying....

We went to the Jonquil Festival today. My wife took this picture in front of a Gelato place in the Market Village. We can't wait until the Publix under-construction around the corner is finished. Right now we go to Kroger or the other stores about 7 minutes away.

Anyway, here are my thoughts about the deal with gun control. Yesterday, a UGA professor shot and killed 3 people at the Town and Gown Community theater in Athens, GA which is about 80 miles from here. Just about an hour ago, there were news of another shooter and killer in Virginia. What is common denominator in all of these murders? Guns with bullets in them. Guns don't kill people! Really? Tell that to the families of those victims. Why do people glorify and honor a piece of metal that has one purpose for existing, which is to kill another being so much? We don't need any more gun control any more than we need to control alcohol or drugs or cigarettes, but what we do need is to expose the unnecessary glorifications and glamorization of the gun culture in America. Children think that guns are the bomb and violence is way cool. Foolishness! Many adults still think that we should honor the military and the people in the Army, Air Force, Marines or Navy. Why? Shouldn't we honor the people who really help build our society up by educating our children, or the doctors or nurses who heal the sick, or even the policemen,firemen, and garbage men and women who are working hard every day to make a living. The real heroes in my book are artists, teachers, musicians, and writers. They don't make a living by dying or by killing other human beings. We need to stop this gun phallic obsession culture and the military mentality in America. And about the 2nd amendment or this right to bear arm bullcrap, please, if you really value a piece of cold metal over a living breathing human being, then, I doubt if you ever have a soul to begin with.

Earth Day Smearth day

Hail storm in 80 degrees weather

Ahh, a little hail storm in Georgia in the springtime. Love this weather, good thing I decided not to go play basketball outside at the park down the street.
Listen to the sounds of the quarter sized hail hitting the roof.

Teabaggers AKA America-Love it or Die

I heart the IRS

Easter 2009

Good Friday is redundant.

I still think that Tyler Hansbrough is the most over-rated college player of all time.
North Carolina was the most boring team in this year's final four. I thought this was Villanova's year, but oh, well. Gonzaga was my pick to win it all, so what do I know.

Why make art? Why do we need art?

(From Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley)
WINTER 2009 Volume V, Issue 3

Arts and Smarts
At a time when educators are preoccupied with standards, testing, and the bottom line, some researchers suggest the arts can boost students' test scores; others aren't convinced. Karin Evans asks, What are the arts good for?

When poet and national endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia gave the 2007 Commencement Address at Stanford University, he used the occasion to deliver an impassioned argument for the value of the arts and arts education.

"Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world," said Gioia. "There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions."
For years, arts advocates like Gioia have been making similar pleas, stressing the intangible benefits of the arts at a time when many Americans are preoccupied with a market–driven culture of entertainment, and schools are consumed with meeting federal standards. Art brings joy, these advocates say, or it evokes our humanity, or, in the words of my 10–year–old daughter, "It cools kids down after all the other hard stuff they have to think about."

Bolstering the case for the arts has become increasingly necessary in recent years, as school budget cuts and the move toward standardized testing have profoundly threatened the role of the arts in schools. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, the federal government started assessing school districts by their students' scores on reading and mathematics tests.

As a result, according to a study by the Center on Education Policy, school districts across the United States increased the time they devoted to tested subjects—reading/language arts and math—while cutting spending on non–tested subjects such as the visual arts and music. The more a school fell behind, by NCLB standards, the more time and money was devoted to those tested subjects, with less going to the arts. The National Education Association has reported that the cuts fall hardest on schools with high numbers of minority children.

And the situation is likely to worsen as state budgets get even tighter. Already, in a round of federal education cuts for 2006 and 2007, arts education nationally was slashed by $35 million. In 2008, the New York City Department of Education's annual study of arts education showed that only eight percent of the city's elementary schools met the state's relatively rigorous standards for arts education—and the city's schools are now facing a $185 million budget cut this year.

For 2009, the nonprofit Center for Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts budget shortfalls in 41 states. California, ranked last among the states in per capita support for the arts, is considering $2 billion of additional cuts to K–12 education. Josef Norris, a grant–supported artist who creates murals with kids in San Francisco's public schools, says he has worked with classes where fifth graders have never picked up a paintbrush or handled a lump of clay.

Given such stiff fiscal and political challenges, some arts advocates have felt pressured to bolster their arguments. Afraid that art won't be able to stand on its own merits, such advocates have sought whatever evidence they can find to argue that art contributes to measurable gains in learning—which, in the No Child Left Behind world, means boosting a school's academic test scores in literacy and mathematics.

And in fact, advocates have gotten a recent lift from new research in several scientific fields. For the first time ever, for example, scientists have used sophisticated brain imaging techniques to examine how music, dance, drama, and the visual arts might positively affect cognition and intelligence. Such work, the researchers claim, is a crucial first step toward understanding whether art can actually make people smarter in ways that can be measured.

But other arts advocates say that's the wrong way to go. Skeptical of some claims of the art–boosts–smarts camp, they instead support a line of research that explores the benefits that are unique to the arts. Let art do what art can do best, they say, and let the mathematics class take care of itself. And so the debate goes on, focused on a question that has long concerned parents, educators, and policy makers alike: What are the arts good for?

The Mozart controversy
The focus on art's contribution to academics came to wide attention in the 1990s, after researchers from the University of California, Irvine, reported in the journal Nature that college students who listened to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking certain parts of an intelligence test improved their scores—a finding that came to be known as the "Mozart Effect."

Before long, parents who heard about the research were playing Mozart to their babies, the governor of Georgia was handing out classical music tapes to parents of newborns, and companies were springing up to package music for parents eager to bolster their children's brain power.

The Mozart Effect research had some clear limitations: It involved only college–age students, and the improved test scores held up only for 15 minutes following the musical experience. After witnessing the strong reaction to their results, the researchers themselves were compelled to write a rejoinder in 1999, pointing out that they had never claimed that "Mozart enhances intelligence."

Still, whether the hard evidence was there or not, the popular assumption took hold that there was a connection. According to a 2006 Gallup poll, 85 percent of Americans believed participation in school music was linked to better grades and higher test scores.

After the study on the Mozart Effect was published, other researchers tried to substantiate a connection between arts participation and improved cognitive and academic skills. For instance, James S. Catterall, a professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, reported in a 1999 paper that middle and high school students with strong involvement in theater or music scored an average of 16 to 18 percentage points higher on standardized tests than those with low arts involvement.

"It's true that students involved in the arts do better in school and on their SATs than those who are not involved," write researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in an article that appeared in the Boston Globe in 2007. However, they point out, correlation doesn't add up to causation: It's quite possible that kids involved in the arts are the ones getting good grades in the first place.

In a landmark survey called REAP—Reviewing Education and the Arts Project—Hetland and Winner examined the research supporting arts education. Their findings, released in 2000, were controversial. They revealed that in most cases there was no demonstrated causal relationship between studying one or more art forms and improved cognitive skills in areas beyond the arts.

"We found inconclusive evidence that music improves mathematical learning and that dance improves spatial learning," reported the researchers. "We found no evidence that studying visual arts, dance, or music improves reading." They continued.

That leaves our most controversial finding. We amassed no evidence that studying the arts, either as separate disciplines or infused into the academic curriculum, raises grades in academic subjects or improves performance on standardized verbal and mathematics tests. ... Our analysis showed that children who studied the arts did no better on achievement tests and earned no higher grades than those who did not study the arts.

Their findings, the researchers said, were greeted with anger. "One scholar told us that we should never have asked the question, but having done so, we should have buried our findings," Hetland and Winner later wrote. "We were shaken." Some critics claimed that their report had shortchanged the effects of art on academics. But the researchers stuck to their conclusions. Furthermore, they cautioned, justifying the arts on the basis of unreliable claims would ultimately do more harm than good.

Arts and the brain
In 2004, in an attempt to sort out the facts, the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, took on the question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter? Under the leadership of neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga, the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium assembled neuroscientists and cognitive scientists from seven universities to study whether dance, music, theater, and visual arts might affect other areas of learning—and how.

After more than three years of research, the results of the $2.1 million project were published in March of 2008 in a report titled "Learning, Arts, and the Brain." Several studies in the report suggested that training in the arts might be related to improvements in math or reading skills. In one of these studies, a University of Oregon team, headed by psychologist Michael Posner, observed the brain activity of children four to seven years old while they worked on computerized exercises intended to mimic the attention–focusing qualities of engaging in art. The researchers concluded that the arts can train children's attention, which in turn improves cognition.

In another Dana consortium study, Elizabeth Spelke, a neuropsychologist at Harvard University, looked at the effects of music training in children and adolescents and found a "clear benefit": Children who had intensive music training did better on some geometry tasks and on map reading. Stanford University psychologist Brian Wandell and colleagues used brain–imaging techniques to study how a certain part of the brain might be influenced by musical activities. He found that students ages 7 to 12 who received more musical training in the first year of the study showed greater improvements in reading fluency over the next two years. Wandell reports that phonological awareness—or the ability to distinguish between speech sounds, which is a predictor of early literacy—was correlated with music training and could be tracked with the development of a specific brain pathway.

Overall, the Dana report didn't go so far as to prove that arts training directly boosts cognitive and academic skills; it offered no concrete evidence that art makes kids smarter. But the project did tighten up the correlations that had been noted before, laying the groundwork for future research into causal explanations. In his introduction to "Learning, Arts, and the Brain," Gazzaniga frames the report as an important first step. "A life–affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience," he writes. "To discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn."

Though Gazzaniga and his Dana Consortium colleagues were quite measured in their assessment, many advocates interpreted the report's results as support for their cause. "Arts Education Linked to Better Brain Activity," read a headline on the website of the Arizona Commission on the Arts after the report was released. A California State PTA newsletter directed parents and teachers to the report, telling them to "find out about the strong links between arts education and cognitive development."

Around the same time in 2008, the advocacy group Americans for the Arts launched a series of public service announcements aimed at encouraging parents to "feed their children the arts" with images of bowls of "Raisin Brahms" or "Van Goghurt" for breakfast, linked to promises that the arts lead to "increased test scores, better creative thinking, patience, and determination." Even Barack Obama's presidential platform, which promised a reinvestment in arts education and professed a broad belief in art's value, fell back, at least partly, on the academic benefits rationale: "Studies show that arts education raises test scores."

But many arts researchers and advocates have reacted strongly against efforts—in research, among advocacy groups, or in schools—that overemphasize the link between the arts and academic proficiency.

Jessica Hoffmann Davis, a cognitive developmental psychologist and founder of the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has long been one of these voices. "It is not by arguing that the arts can do what other subjects already do (or do better) that a secure place can be found for the arts in education," she writes in her recent book, Why Our Schools Need the Arts. "We have been so driven to measure the impact of the arts in education that we began to forget that their strength lies beyond the measurable."

In an interview, she adds, "No Child Left Behind has sapped the energy and passion out of our classrooms. It's a malaise. Standardized testing is leaving everyone behind—teachers and kids—with this heavy preoccupation on what we can measure."

Another leading expert on the arts, Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, went so far in an interview as to call it an "American disease" to try to justify the arts in terms of benefits for other disciplines. No one, says Gardner, argues that students should take math because it will make them perform better in music.

Education of vision
So what are the arts good for?
In 2007, Hetland and Winner published a book, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Art Education, that is so far one of the most rigorous studies of what the arts teach. "Before we can make the case for the importance of arts education, we need to find out what the arts actually teach and what art students actually learn," they write.

Working in high school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum—what they call "studio habits of mind." One key habit was "learning to engage and persist," meaning that the arts teach students how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. "Students need to find problems of interest and work with them deeply over sustained periods of time," write Hetland and Winner.

The researchers also found that the arts help students learn to "envision"—that is, how to think about that which they can't see. That's a skill that offers payoffs in other subjects, they note. The ability to envision can help a student generate a hypothesis in science, for instance, or imagine past events in history class.

Other researchers have identified additional benefits that are particular to the arts. In Why Our Schools Need the Arts, Davis outlines many of these benefits, including the quality of empathy. "We need the arts because they remind children that their emotions are equally worthy of respect and expression," she said in an interview. "The arts introduce children to connectivity, engagement, and allow a sense of identification with, and responsibility for, others." As a young researcher, Davis once asked adults, children of varying ages, and professional artists to draw emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger. She found that even very young children could communicate those emotions through drawing. In fact, she observes, "The arts, like no other subject, give children the media and the opportunity to shape and communicate their feelings."

Elliot Eisner, an emeritus professor of art and education at Stanford University and a longtime leader in the field, has emphasized the subtle but important ways the arts can enhance thinking—the ability to use metaphor, for example, or the role of imagination. "These are outcomes that are useful," says Eisner, "not only in the arts, but in business and other activities where good thinking is employed."

At last year's annual convention for the National Art Education Association, Eisner told the crowd, "In the arts, imagination is a primary virtue. So it should be in the teaching of mathematics, in all of the sciences, in history, and indeed, in virtually all that humans create."

"To help students treat their work as a work of art is no small achievement," he added. "Given this conception, we can ask how much time should be devoted to the arts in school? The answer is clear: all of it."

An "education of vision" is also high on Eisner's list of benefits. "You want to help youngsters really see a tree or urban landscape or an apple. It's one of the things they can do the rest of their lives."

Such elusive, immeasurable benefits of the arts may, in fact, be among the most valuable. "At this time when we are facing the threat of the reduction of learning to testable right and wrong answers," says Davis, "we might say the most important thing about arts learning is that it features ambiguity and respect for the viability of different perspectives and judgments."

But perhaps most significantly, Davis argues that the arts can engage children who might not otherwise be reached by academics. In fact, an increasing amount of attention is being focused on the benefits of the arts for at–risk youth.

For instance, when a program called the YouthARTS Development Project, a partnership involving the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Justice Department, engaged at–risk youth in art programs, it found that the participants showed an increased ability to work with others and finish tasks, and showed better attitudes toward school, fewer court referrals, and improved self–esteem.

"Folks are responding to the deficits in schools by saying, 'Bring in the arts,'" says Davis. "Ironically that's what we've always done with individual kids, always turned to the arts as a kid was about to drop out of school. We have always known that arts will save the day, but now the day is so bleak that we have a national charge to do what arts do best—to provide energy and spirit and excitement and community."

In San Francisco, artist Josef Norris has seen evidence of this claim first–hand. When he worked with children to create a mural at an inner–city school, the project was integrated into a unit on California history and immigration. Every single child in the class had a parent or grandparent who'd been born in another country, says Norris, and each child made a tile depicting some aspect of his or her family's history.

"Kids who are struggling academically can get hooked," he says. "You live for the moments when the kids shine—when a pathologically shy girl shows up for mural making on a Saturday morning and stays all day long. Or when a child paints a tile about his family, then brings his grandmother to the unveiling of the mural and says proudly, 'I made that.'"

Art is food for the soul and nourishment for the mind.