Sandra Alvarez: The Art of the Matter

On a cold January morning, Sandra Alvarez braved the elements outside Loker Student Union to paint en plein air during an arts and crafts for teachers winter session class. The liberal studies major currently works as an instructional aide at Meyler Street Elementary School in Torrance, and is often in charge of developing art projects for her young students.

“Art helps students to become more open-minded and to see things from more than one point of view,” says Alvarez. “And no age is too young to start teaching art. I worked with my grandsons from the age of 4, doing lots of different art projects, and they are always asking when we are going to do the next one. I now have a 2-year-old granddaughter who has been doing art work since she was 1. In my opinion, art is what makes each child learn to imagine. And without imagination, they don’t do as well in school.”

Alvarez embarked on her path to teaching accidentally, when her son’s mother-in-law remarked that she would be good at it.

“I had been helping my son out coaching baseball and basketball,” Alvarez recalls. "They thought I would be good with kids. I thought it was only because [I was working with] my grandkids.”

Alvarez, a grandmother of five, was hired by Meyler Street Elementary School four years ago after being laid off from her job as a lighting director for KCAL 9 News. She found that despite her misgivings, she does work well with young people.

“[I] really liked the fact that I was getting through to the kids. And I realize I have some disabilities that I would recognize in the kids to be able to help them,” she says, explaining that she has a form of dyslexia.

Alvarez says the greatest reward for her in sharing art with Meyler Street students is “seeing them light up and get excited about being creative and figuring out how to make something on their own.

“One of the teachers I was working for was getting married in February,” she recalls. “I got the kids to make a quilt. They each did their own square and I just sewed it all together. When we brought it and gave it to the teacher, they were all [saying about their squares], ‘I did that one!’”

As eager as she is to share art with her young charges, Alvarez is just as quick to let them know when they are hampering another student’s creativity.

“I get really upset when a child puts down another child’s work,” she says. “I just say, ‘You know, his is very nice. Look at all the details he’s put in here.’ And we’ll go through the process of talking about the details. Then I’ll say, ‘Look at yours, you’ve got so much detail too. But his is his view of what he sees and yours is your view.’

“One of [the] teachers brought a book in that had all the different artists in it, from the crazy ones to the simple ones to the very refined ones, showing that there isn’t any exact way of doing this. Even if [kids] think they can’t [create art], they can. The reason why they ‘can’t’ is not because they don’t have the talent, but because they’ve never explored it. They haven’t tried to just sit down and just draw and not worry about what someone else thinks.”

Alvarez’s past careers have involved art in some way, including a job as a lithograph print maker and camera operator for Hughes Aircraft. As she looks forward to teaching science upon earning her credential, she says that art training in schools is important because of the way it complements other types of learning.

“[Art] gives you the ability to think outside the box,” she notes. “I’ve seen too many people who haven’t the faintest idea how to think when looking at a science project, even how to think about which way to look at a slide or how to [find a solution]. A lot of students today do not have the imagination of being able to think of more then one way to do things. They’re not thinking about what they might find or how they can invent a way to find it.

“Art is learning how to create a way to look at something differently,” Alvarez concludes. “And if you can’t look at it differently, I don’t think you [can find] a way of doing it.”

- Joanie Harmon