Teacher Standards: Failed Teacher II

Once upon a time I was an art teacher. When I was studying teachers' ed, I was told never to accept a job at a school whose art budget was less than $10.00 a kid. For my first job, at age 22, I ended up teaching art at a school whose budget was $3.00 a kid. That bought HB pencils and sketching paper...maybe. As well, I was teaching grade eights, about forty to a class. And art was a joke to them. They arrived expecting nothing, ready to create havoc.

And they did. In art class, there is freedom. Freedom to interpret, yes. But you have to get up to get more paint or change your paint water, wash the clay off your hands, borrow scissors or refill your glue pot. It's too easy to be a "shit-disturber".

In my classes, that meant clay-tossing, paintbrush flicking, self-decoration, glue-smearing everywhere and paper-jet throwing. Or just generally sauntering around the classroom rough-housing, annoying the kids who were applying themselves.

I found the only way to keep students in their desks was to assign a sketching project, either still life or life drawing, (with one of them posing.) Even though it's a legitimate art lesson, it was my punishment for their getting out of control. They hated it. They found it too restrictive and demanding.

What's interesting about art class, (like any other class) is it is restrictive and demanding. A project demands your creative commitment and restricts within its paramenters. A "tone and texture" project is about those two elements, regardless of how you work with them. It is not about "balance and colour". Thus, even though an art student can do "what he or she wants", he/she has to be faithful to the requirements of the task.

Art is craft and discipline and I had a curriculum I had to cover. For those who took the subject because they were talented or simply loved it, craft and discipline got lost in the creative process. For those who were only taking art because it was "a bird course" or was the only option left, craft and discipline were simpy other impositions of school.

One of my worst grade eight classes was full of second and third repeaters...pubescent boys who were as tall as I am, (5'10"). They were rough and foul. The school was in a lower-middle-class area and the dropout rate was high. So were a lot of the kids: you name the drug.

I had no idea how to teach "art" to kids who weren't the least creative, who could have cared less about being there, let alone handing in a project.

But I tried. I tried to keep the challenges simple and understandable, even though I was doing a disservice to the keen, talented kids. Often I let them work independently.

The thing about it was, the untalented kids had the potential to at least enjoy themselves, even if they weren't strictly learning "craft". But I got really hung up on my "responsibility" to teach them and forgot about the self-expression part of art.

One afternoon, I had a wicked migraine: a railway spike in my right temple. I was expecting my worst class and I didn't know how I was going to cope. So I simply told the truth. "I'm not feeling well. Do whatever you want." "Anything?" "As long as you don't use up too much stuff."

I thought they'd do splattery abstracts on paper or each other. I thought they'd make grotesque horror masks with the clay. But they collected all the still life bottles and containers and filled them with varying levels of water and put them on the posing table with upside-down paint jars and muffin tins and water cups and used their paint brushes as drumsticks and created a kind of orchestra.

I watched the kids having fun. And all I could think was, "What if the principal drops in?"

I could just hear him. "Miss A__. What is this? What's going on? This isn't art class." But it WAS art class...well, maybe music class. It was a surge of pure creative energy. (And co-operation.)

That class was a breakthrough. After that we all had a new understanding of each other. I think they could appreciate, in some oblique way, what it meant to release yourself into a creative act. And I recognized that each of us, in his/her own way, is capable of that release.

But how to do that and still do my job? There were a set of objectives I was obliged to instuct, tests to gauge that and report cards to fill out. And I owed the interested kids something.

We couldn't have an orchestra everyday and suffice it to say, the disinterested students didn't really try to get involved in what I had to teach and ultimately I had to fail them. Quite literally, I FAILED them. That is I let them down. Or the course did.

I am an artist. I know drawing and painting and sculpting and printmaking require craft and discipline. But creative expression is a whole different matter. It is an instinct that comes from deep within and it and can be fostered.

If I had been teaching "Creative Expression" and not "Art", everyone would have passed with flying colours.