My first teaching position was at the Parkside School, which is a school for children with speech and language based disabilities. For so many of my students, it was plain to see that standard academic assessments would not be a fitting measure of their brilliance or potential. They were masters of topics that captured their curiosity, while it was a real challenge to engage them with material that didn’t speak to their strengths or interests.

At the same time, as a New Yorker with a lot of creative friends, I was surrounded by adults who had struggled their way through school. Some had learning disabilities that made the task of being a “good student” incredibly difficulty no matter how hard they worked, while others struggled with ADHD and were labeled “trouble makers.” Plus, there were those who simply weren’t interested in or motivated by standard academic curriculum. School was a largely miserable and disheartening experience for all of them.

I founded Smarten Up with these two groups of learners in mind. Our guiding principle is that learning should be fun. While school is not always easy, and understanding new material is often difficult, at Smarten Up we believe that every child is capable of learning. All it takes is creative instruction. That is why we strive to connect each student’s interests to classroom material.

April’s blog posts are a celebration of creativity and the many ways in which the arts can enrich learning. Our increasingly structured, competitive, and engaged world leaves less and less time for the sort of sensitivity, flexibility, and self-exploration that comes with creative expression. Hopefully these posts will remind all of us to make a little more time for the arts in the lives of our children (and ourselves)!