Almost done with my grading. What a weird semester. I felt like I was part computer technician, You Tube video person and finally a professor. The part that I love about teaching studio art was pretty much totally gone. That is the improvisational day-to-day inventions in class and the personal interactions with students. 

I have a general art making and teaching philosophy that has guided both for my 32 years of teaching. There is a core belief that's pretty much the same and then there is a constantly shifting practice based on new information. I won't go into what they are because in truth they are very difficult, if not nearly impossible, to articulate with words. I mean I can...I have when needed but so often it reads like meaningless gibberish. 

This semester of teaching online challenged those precepts big time. I think it was a good thing though. It’s my last year of teaching, I retire at the end of next semester. In a lot of ways, designing my classes for online teaching turned into a retrospective tour of those 32 years. I ended up going through each day of a semester, deconstructing, reconstructing, examining and reinventing all of the assignments I had taken for granted for so many years. In many ways it was a beautiful gift to be able to do this.  

I was also living my art ideals in real time.  Allowing for new experiences, questioning old habits and processes and living in the moment, welcoming the creative muse into my teaching. 

I’ve always felt it my responsibility to turn a classroom into an environment that formed creativity not just discussed it.  This requires a terrifying level of vulnerability from the person in charge of the classroom….me.  Asking fundamental questions that go so far as subverting my own authority and knowledge is what I’m talking about.  Welcoming my students along on my journey of self-discovery along with all the successes and failures, questions and frustrations.  

 I’ve never once felt I was a teacher.  Never.  That is because I questioned my own knowledge in real time, in front of my students. What I am is an artist struggling with their art in the deepest ways possible.  Then I talk about that, I attempted to exemplify and model that behavior.  At times the classroom felt chaotic and out of control.  There were many times over the years when students were frustrated that I wouldn’t tell them “what to do”.  A lot of times when I ignored someone because they needed to figure it out on their own.  Other times I would babble on for hours, I can preach the gospel of painting!  

The pandemic with the resulting online teaching tossed much of this up in the air.  I could never see what the students were doing.  It’s like art making was turned into bits and bytes of information.  It was impossible to be vulnerable before my students.  Well, I did try with my You Tube videos.  But I don’t think they could smell my fear, they couldn’t really see me shake. 

Now I’m grading them all.  I am, of course, being generous.  Did they learn as much?  No, I don’t think they did.  Or maybe that’s the wrong question.  Did they learn?  I think they did, I also think they learned something different than all the other students in my previous sixty-four semesters.  An overworked word, resilience, they learned that.  I think, I hope, they learned the connection between the life they live and the art they make.   That difficult to teach connection between their sense of who they are, the moment and their art.  Sometimes I think of that as desire, other times fear, then most of the time it’s a feeling that is all about, yes…. vulnerability.  Letting go and opening up to extraordinary and magical things.  Maybe that’s what they learned, I hope so because it really is all I’ve ever tried to teach.