That moment when your mind begins to connect the dots, when the world makes sense in a new way, you experience an epiphany! …and then you find out that someone else thought of it too.
My mind is so active when it creates art; it discovers, analyzes, anticipates, reacts, expresses, compares, contemplates, decides, reflects… …and the very experience of all this activity made me wonder why art appears as such a stagnant word.
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While working on the drawing shown above, I shared my ‘epiphany’ with the world…
“Art is a verb”
…on Twitter and Facebook.
Then I happened to read Erik Wahl’s post, which was much more eloquent than my own:
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In all honesty, I’m glad my drawing turned out the way I hoped it would, but it is only secondary compared to the thought process behind it. This is why it is critical to make learning visible in the classroom, to provide multiple ways that we can collect evidence of student thinking. It is our responsibility as educators to assess knowledge and to recognize progress — to realize the connections that our students are making.
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Northern Art Teacher 
Colleen,
I’m writing to you as I sit on the floor in one of my children’s rooms, providing comfort as he fights his anxiety over not being able to sleep. We really needed to find your Instagram post tonight, to help us realize that other people sometimes can’t sleep, and have developed some strategies to deal with it. Thank you. You helped.
Lisa, I’m so glad that this little post could provide you both with some comfort. I had no idea that anxiety affected sleep to such an extent, but it’s an unfortunate reality. The difficult part is finding a way to battle anxiety when you have no sleep. It can be very hard to find a way out of that cycle. Take good care.
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