Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! Read Free Page B

graders, learning everything there was to know about being a student at Cathedral School of the Arts.
    After Mr. Crawley told us how happy we should be to be there (and I was!), they divided us up by program—theater, music, and visual arts. My group went with Mrs. Ling, the head of the art program, and she gave us a tour of that part of the school.
    I guess if I had to pick one word to describe everything Mrs. Ling showed us on that tour, it would have to be…
totally, amazingly cooler than I ever expected
. (Lucky for me, I don’t have to pick just one.) I couldn’t wait to try everything I saw, and the more I saw, the more I wanted to try.
    I mean, I was still going to have to get up and go to school five days a week. There was no way around that. Still—seventh grade was looking up, up, UP!

THE BIG CATCH
(AND I DON’T MEAN FISH)
    E xcept, of course, it wasn’t exactly that simple. (It never is, right?)
    After the tour, Mrs. Ling sat us all down in one of the art rooms and gave us a big talk.
    It started off with the usual stuff about rules, and classes, and I’m not sure what else, because I wasn’t exactly listening. I was still too excited about everything else.
    But then, right near the end, she threw in the big catch.
    “Boys and girls, I believe every one of you can do extremely well here,” she said.
“However—
    “—not every student is invited back to Cathedral at the end of the year.”
    Now she had my attention. And there was more too.
    “As some of you already know, all visual arts students at Cathedral are required to reapply for the program after our Spring Art Show in March,” Mrs. Ling said. “In the meantime, if you can’t keep up with your academic classes
and
your art assignments,
and
show us that you really want to be here, you might find yourself somewhere else next fall.”
    In other words, if I couldn’t figure out a way to do this…

    … then at the end of the year, I was going to be doing this:

    To be honest, up until then I kind of thought it was a big deal that I had gotten into Cathedral at all. But it turned out that was the easy part.
    Getting in was one thing.
    Now I had to figure out how to
stay
in.

THE STUFF OF ART
    A fter orientation, my first three periods of the day were math, social studies, and…
    You get the idea. All that stuff is just as boring in art school as it is anywhere else.
    But then for fourth and fifth, every seventh grader had a double period of art, every single day. That meant ten periods a week I could actually look forward to, which was ten more than I had at Hills Village. Not too bad.
    My first actual art class was drawing with Mr. Beekman, and let me tell you a few things about him. If there was ever a contest for world’s oldest teacher, I’d definitely enter Mr. Beekman, and he might even win. He talked with an English accent and said stuff like “ladies and gentlemen” a lot.
    The very first thing he ever said to us was this:

    So there it was, thirty seconds into my first art class, and I was already totally confused.
    I was still trying to figure out that last part when Mr. Beekman turned on the slide projector and showed us a drawing of a big, fat horse. (At least, I think it was a horse. I wasn’t sure about anything right then.)
    “Twenty-three thousand years ago, someone created this image on the wall of a cave,” Mr. Beekman said. “Now, who do you suppose was the artist here?”

    “Was it you?” I heard someone say, too quietly for Beekman to hear.
    “The answer, of course, is that we can’t possibly know,” he said. “Even so, these early images
can
tell us quite a bit about the people who created them—the animals they hunted, the stories they told each other, theelements of the world around them, and the objects of their everyday lives. Do you see?”
    No, I did not.
    Then Beekman turned around and wrote on the board: ART = LIFE = ART .
    “In this class, I’ll teach you about proper materials, line quality,