2025 –Who’s Calling? My Professional Life as a Series of Phone Calls

“We said we want these big ideas to ground the curriculum and Wyatt said, ‘I don’t know. That’s not the way we do this. We always organize our textbooks around the forms and the elements and principles of design, art forms, and media. So for example, you have a chapter of line, shape, color, you’d have a chapter on printmaking sculpture, painting, and so on.’

“We said, ‘NO, we don’t want to do that. We want to work with ideas, themes.’ And I have to tell you, during that middle school process, they closed the book on it. They called us and said, ‘This is theme thing isn’t working. We don’t think we’re going to do it. We’re going to close down this project.’ And we drove up to Western Massachusetts and talked them down about that. So we won, we got themes.”