Dumb Art Games

Recently I noticed some of our online art games were getting a lot of traffic and since I am the webmaster, I knew how to see where this traffic was coming from. It was all coming from a high school teacher’s website for his students. Our online art games were linked to under the title:

Dumb Art Games

Say what! Of course I couldn’t let that pass so I sent an email to the teacher (who also advertised the number of shopping days left until his birthday and requested he not receive animals). Here’s my email:

My Dear Sir,

I take great exception to our games being called “Dumb”. Have you no shame? The affront to our dignity here at ARTK12 has been substantial. And so, you leave us no choice!

ARTK12 will forthwith ignore the number of shopping days until Mr. ————–’s birthday. And if for some reason, due to the hectic schedules that we currently keep, we forget to ignore this, we shall only send animals and only very large animals that require great care and massive amounts of food.

I hope this brings home to you the egregious nature of your vocabulary choices. Henceforth, please refrain from these kinds of insults or it is possible we may need to get the courts involved.

Good day, Sir!

Regards,
The Husband

I then received the following reply:

Dear Husband,

The shame is felt by me and I will remedy this slight as soon as I am done groveling groveling for your acceptance of my apology.

Many of my students did enjoy your games today, so I am glad that I included your link on my page.

Thank you for your games and humor at handling this, and…

Please do not send any animals!

My apologies,
-pH

I love reciprocated humor! In truth, I thought the title was a good one. That would certainly attract the attention of students just as something like this would not:

“Educational Art Games to Help You Appreciate the Great Art that you Obviously Know Nothing About”

So let’s talk about these “Dumb” art games.

The games on ARTK12 are not going to make your students art geniuses, nor is that the intent. Stating the obvious, I know. The main goal of the games is to get your students looking at great art and to become familiar with the pieces we have chosen. If the games are fun for your students then maybe we can get them to look at these pieces again and again and begin to see that great art is far more than skilled execution. It is, in the best examples, about this journey we call life.