[Kid Inspiration]

I just read the best newspaper article ever.

Would you like to read it?

But what if I do and then you don’t read it all the way through… and watch the video clips on the page?

I guess I will have to take that chance.

Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Can one of the nation’s greatest musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? The newspaper sets out to discover if violinist Josh Bell — and his Stradivarius — could stop busy commuters in their tracks. Read On.

Have a thorough read of the article… take your time, it may take a few minutes to really read it all.

Done?

Okay, just love the premise and experiment.

You can probably guess the one section that I loved the most.

Yep.

Its was this paragraph.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

The point I would like to propose to you is this.

NOT that parents can often be too busy to notice their children.

BUT that every child in their first year of school considers themselves an artist/painter/sculpter. Then with every subsequent year when you ask the same question less and less children put up their hands to admit to their creativity.

Until you have a classroom with no artists by early high school.

(Teachers, try the above in your classroom).

This from the aforementioned article.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Maybe life just chokes the poetry out of us.

When kids notice beauty… life…

I want to let them enjoy it.

And teach them how to live with poetry.