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Folding In A Lesson

Liz Bleau/Tampa Tribune photo.

Keith Whitehead, a local obstetrician, shares his love of origami with sixth-grade students at McLane Middle School as part of the Great American Teach-In. Whitehead is seen doing the initial fold of the square paper that will become a crane.

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By LIZ BLEAU, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 21, 2007

BRANDON - When obstetrician Keith Whitehead was growing up as a military brat in Japan, he could not read or speak Japanese. But he found a way of connecting with people through the art of origami.

He experiences the joy he did as a boy following diagrams and creating birds and other creatures by folding paper into intricate shapes.

Last week, he shared his love of origami with students at McLane Middle School by participating in the Great American Teach-In. He chose to work with students with and without learning disabilities because he and his wife, Nikole, have two children with Down syndrome, son Andrew, 20, and a baby girl they adopted, Abigail.

Whitehead spent two years living in Okinawa.

"All the books I had were in Japanese, and I could not read that well at that age, anyway," he said. "But I could follow the diagrams in the origami books, and that is how I learned."

Many of the Japanese children he grew up with were from poor families and had few toys, "but as long as they had a scrap of paper, they could make them," he said.

Originally, origami was an art form for the elite because paper was expensive. Now, anyone with a scrap of paper can make something, Whitehead said.

Whitehead visited McLane at the request of teacher Nancy Toole. She used to be an assistant teacher at Durant High School, where she worked one-on-one for three years with Andrew Whitehead.

Toole knew Andrew's dad was proficient at origami. She also knew she and four other McLane teachers planned to have students make 1,000 paper cranes to send to schools in Hiroshima, Japan, as a symbol of peace.

"He was a natural to do this," she said.

Whitehead's first stop of the day was Lynn Taylor's sixth-grade class, where he offered a brief history of origami while the students passed around square sheets of paper they would use to create the traditional origami crane.

He said origami was developed in China during the first century and migrated to Japan in the sixth and seventh centuries. The Moors in Europe also made paper folding a craft about the same time, but they made geometric forms instead of images of man or animals.

The first English-language book on origami was written and published in 1797 by magician and illusionist Harry Houdini, Whitehead told the students.

Whitehead showed students a variety of creatures he made from dollar bills, including an eagle, a shark and a sting ray. And step by step, he instructed the youngsters how to fold their paper squares to make cranes.

Hard-line origami traditionalists believe only square pieces of paper should be used, but others think rectangular paper is an acceptable medium, too, he said. And some people think true origami should have no cuts in the paper; others disagree.

"But if you can do one style of origami," he said, "you can do any kind."

STUDENTS MAKE A CRANE

Reporter Liz Bleau can be reached at (813) 865-1557 or lbleau@tampatrib.com.

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