My art teacher in high school, Dale Newman, once asked the class to paint pieces of the ceiling. What I loved about this act was that it allowed me and the rest of my classmates to define part of the room, part of the space we inhabited every single day. We were designing our environment in a small way. This had a deep impact on my own teaching…years later. I asked the students if they’d like to paint the ceiling like it was part of the sky. The building was old, and the rooms could feel small and stifling. We decided to paint the ceiling, grow a garden, etc. It had very little to do with a specific lesson and more to do with life. Sometimes, we all need to just change the setting to make our lives a little more like our dreams.
Jason Dean Arnold 