Grad panels, a 'circle-of-life' thing...

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

Early December: time to look at what the grad students are up to this year.

A few years back, I wrote a little bit about grad panels, and once again I am losing sleep over them. I am doing a lot fewer this year than most as I am out on leave, but I still need to join in for a few. Going this year is odd, since i haven't been in any grad students' studios. I am part of some gray facade of higher ed this year...the committee member no one really knows.

Add this to the fact that I cannot keep straight the rituals of various schools (is this the school where we ask the candidate to leave and wherein we have the real, substantive conversation in his/her absence, or is this the school where they stay and we are awkwardly keeping comments to ourselves for a few minutes?) and I am a mostly useless committee member.

Except for one thing: I am honest and I have no stake in anyone. 

I hate committees where people know the candidate and overlook obvious shortcomings of the work or the thesis. I fear ever being that teacher, one who has formed an attachment to a student that precludes clear-eyed evaluation of the work. 

I did three meetings in a week, and I've seen too much of that. When the work is good, it makes you play the downer, pointing out some way in which it could be better. When it's less than good, you are the one whose impatience at being a part of the conversation colors the whole meeting.

All of which leads me to ask, why do we do these panels this way? When I was in grad school, a students could select a panel of more-or-less total strangers (you know, the sort of people who might go see shows?) They didn't talk about the work as though you were going to revise anything; they talked about it as a thing that was done and sitting in front of them that needed to be figured out in 40 minutes. They didn't want to make better, they wanted to understand what it was. It was the best thing in the world - you saw how the work played to people who hadn't been listening to you figure it out for 15 weeks. They would never see you again. They told you it was great. Or that it wasn't great. Most of the time, they split the vote. 

As I get farther and farther in my teaching career, I get more and more clarity about what I can and cannot hope to do as a teacher. I see a lot of my colleagues trying to change lives. I hear a lot of conversations about teaching predicated on recalling 'that teacher' who changed your life. 

I have had great teachers. I have learned a lot, and I'm grateful to the many formal teachers I have had, and to the colleagues I learned from. But I can't get on board with the mystical, charismatic teaching ideal. What I see every time I sit down with students shows me that that's a bad idea. What I want to see is work.