Long before any of this, I was a kid in the Bronx who could not believe a whale could be that big.
I have loved this since I was small.
Before I was a teaching artist, before the Brooklyn Museum or any residency, I was a kid in the Bronx who loved to make things.
I was lucky in a way I did not understand at the time. My elementary school believed in art, and it believed in taking us out into the city to see it for ourselves. We made things constantly, and we went places: museums, gardens, the kinds of rooms where you learn that the world is much larger than your block. That school is a big part of why I do what I do now.
Then I met the whale.
When I was eight, in second grade, every class was assigned a marine animal to study. Mine was the blue whale. To meet it, we went to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, to the great hall where the blue whale hangs from the ceiling, suspended in the blue dark like it is still swimming.
I stood underneath it and could not believe an animal that big was real. The more I learned, the more impossible it seemed.
The more I read, the more impossible it seemed. Move along the whale, the way we once filled one in by hand.
I did not have the words for it then.
It took me years to understand what that hallway actually was. Everything I now believe about teaching was already in it, before I knew any of it had a name.
We asked before we answered.
We did not just look at the whale. We wanted to know it, so we researched it and wrote what we found inside its body. The questions a kid asks when she cannot believe something is real are the same ones I ask my students to bring to a painting now.
Critical InquiryWe made it with our hands.
We did not only read about the whale. We made it. The learning lived in the crayons, in the hundred feet of blue. It still does. Technique and knowledge become real in your hands, not just in your head.
Creative ExpressionWe did it together, and the whole city was the classroom.
My teachers did not treat the museum as a single special trip. They took us out into the city again and again, to its museums and cultural venues, because they understood that New York itself holds an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, and that it belonged to us.
And the room I learned in was a Title I classroom in the Bronx, full of children who were immigrants or the children of immigrants, from many different places. We came to know each other through exactly this kind of making. The whale was not only something we drew. It was a hundred of us, side by side on the floor, becoming a class.
Culturally Responsive TeachingEverything I do now traces back to that floor.
So I drew it on my arm.
The blue whale has been my favorite animal ever since. It stands for the things that made me: the power of art, the power of learning, and the particular magic that happens when those two meet inside a community.
I drew the whale myself and put it on my right forearm, my drawing arm, so it lives as an extension of my own hand. When Learning with Lado began, there was never really a question of what the logo would be. The whale was already there.
That is the whole secret. I am not a brand that decided a whale would test well. I am a person who has loved art and learning since she was small, and who has spent her life trying to give other people the thing a Bronx public school once gave me.
Hello, World!