Note: I was asked by a friend who runs a website that collects stories to write about teaching. It didn't work out, but I wanted to post the piece on this blog to get some ideas I had while working on it aired out. Comments are welcome.
From go, I knew that my work was slow to develop and that I wanted teaching to be a big part of my professional life. So I paid attention to teachers who I found effective.
Problem was I paid attention only to those who taught me, not those sitting in the classes and studios where I worked and studied. Thank heaven not every student was like me. It’s enough to say I learned the most from teachers who could teach students like me, ones who might politely be called ‘focused’ but who might more accurately be described as obsessed, or even nuts.
This became apparent when I was first asked to teach a workshop on piecing and quilting. That my students might have enrolled because they had a curiosity about the medium rather than a consuming obsession struck me as odd. Why go to the trouble of taking a class if your desire to know about this was any less than unbearable? Why not teach your self? That these students might have been smarter than me (they were) and realized that teaching is not a form of indoctrination but rather the transfer of knowledge was…well, it wasn’t how I approached being a student. As a student, I have enormous appetite and probably unhealthy appetite. As a teacher, I had to learn how to prepare meals – even courses – that were digestible.
So I had to learn all over again how to be in a studio or class room, how to listen to where my students were coming from and not try to cram everything I knew about a subject into a single session or even semester. I had to learn that people come to learning for a variety of reasons, and that they bring with them an astounding range of skills and experiences that may facilitate or complicate their education, but which nonetheless enrich it. I had to learn that the knowledge you convey as a teacher is a neutral power, and it’s up to the student to use it for good. As a teacher, you can model ethical behavior, but you cannot dictate it.
Teaching gradually shifted for me from a form of evangelism to something else. Rather than seeing myself on a mission to convey certain techniques and information before they disappear in the vapor of ‘progress’, I now see myself as a sort of arms dealer. I try to listen to what my students objectives are and I provide students with technical and ideological weaponry and force multipliers to express ideas they have which may require fortification. The process of education has changed for me from a steady ascend toward enlightenment (in which the teacher might illuminate a path for student) to an ongoing battle against complacency in which I can only hope my students are wise and mature enough to choose what I believe is the right side (after all, I’m not totally without ethics). If they’re not, they still deserve an education and I’ll deal with them in my civic and professional life.
After all, what animates our professional lives and private curiosities may not be what sparks a student’s imagination. As a teacher, one must rethink and re-imagine the subject one teaches over and over from multiple points of view, looking for ways into it. I get a taste in my mouth like sour milk when someone talks about teachers ‘making a subject interesting’ for students, but I suppose that may just be another way of addressing the importance of making it relevant for the learner. Teachers (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) occasionally feel that their subject’s importance needn’t be investigated…it was important enough to get into the curriculum, right? A lot of what I teach (in courses ranging from first years studio classes to graduate seminars) is material for which there are no right answers…only more and less suitable temporarily meaningful solutions.
One day, I had a student teach me something good. He was a trombone player in a section of first year writing, and was pretty bright. Art, he suggested, is a verb. Things get ‘art-ed’; they undergo a kind of transformation. I had been watching him and his classmates struggle with the idea that art might not reside in mere objecthood in our class discussions, and his solution – simple and elegant – has been an inspiration to me. Did I teach him to think of art in that expansive way? No, not in anyway I’d previously understood teaching. I’d just set up conditions under which he could learn it.
This was an accident, but one I have tried to turn into a method. I realized I had become the teacher I wanted to be in a painting class not long ago, when I was in high arms-dealer mode, working through the possibilities a student might entertain to get unstuck in her work. After going through a range of complicated options, I mentioned some rather ludicrous possibility that drifted into my mind. My student interrupted me and asked, somewhat breathlessly, “Can I do that?”
Part of me wanted to list all the artists who had done that, and provide a brief homily on how one might go about doing that. But part of me had become a better teacher. So I said, “I don’t know, can you?”
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