Stephani Stephenson on mon 31 dec 01
We all decry the situation where skills are NOT taught. Mel has talked
about this with regard to the college art studios, and I too have seen
this situation. While thinking about this I remembered something of a
different nature which happened in my own education. I am just going to
share this because it tells you how wrong it CAN get. How one battle-ax
of a teacher thought she would teach a little girl some 'skills' .
Grade school. I LOVED to draw, it was my favorite activity. Best
present I ever got was from someone who worked for the TV station in
town. He gave me a box of continuous paper. Miles of it. You could pull
it out of the box and just keep drawing.
I even use to illustrate my homework, not all the time, just sometimes.
In 5th grade my teacher told me that I would have to stop doing that .
OK, no biggie, no problem.
I also had a difficulty with smudging my papers. My penmanship was
pretty good, but being left-handed, my hand would drag over the paper,
with those #2 soft pencils and all, the paper would smudge. I tried
using a blank piece of paper under my left hand , I tried turning the
paper different ways and holding the pencil different ways, but just
couldn't get it 100% perfect. My homework was often smudged or it had
visible eraser marks. The teacher use to mark down my score, circling
any smudge or eraser mar.. Not just in penmanship, but a math
assignment would be marked down, not because the answer were wrong but
because the page would have a smudge . OK, so I worked on that, and it
got a little better because I redid each paper over and over. I am
sure I still left sweaty palm marks on it though, because that is how I
began to dread homework and assignments instead of loving them as I had
done before.
Then the teacher decided, (in 5th grade, remember), that being
left-handed was altogether wrong so she forbid me to use my left hand.
Well , then my homework was REALLY illegible, so she would mark me down
because it wasn't readable (duh). Yet if I turned in an assignment that
WAS readable she knew I did it with my left hand, so she'd flunk me
anyway. This was before the popularity of the phrase, 'Catch-22''. OK, I
developed nervous ticks over this one, as I couldn't figure a way to
resolve the problem. Boy o' boy ,did I want to be a neat little right
handed girl with perfect penmanship and spotless papers.
Meanwhile the teacher decided to teach the class how to draw, so we
had a lesson on how to draw a face. Now I LOVED drawing faces, but the
rules were that the features on the face must be a certain measured size
and a measured shape and a measured distance from each other. . Now I ,
as a lefty who loved to draw faces freehand, from all different angles,
was in a situation, as a child, where I not only had to draw with my
OTHER hand but had to do so in a measured ,calculated way. Well
everybody's faces looked exactly alike, like stilted robots, and mine
was even worse than a stilted robot because I couldn't control the
pencil very well with my right hand.
What effect did this have? I never took any art class till I was 25.
Drawing was near to my heart and I did not want anyone ever to take that
away from me or invade that ever again. This was the one area where I
had developed skill at an early age. Unfortunately my protective
reaction kept me from perhaps developing that skill even more. I never
set foot inside any art classes in junior high or high school. I took
all math and sciences, which actually, wasn't so bad, but I didn't feel
quite at home there. When I did finally take a painting class in
college, at 25, I worked in seclusion and was quite shy and embarrassed
about showing any work to anyone.
Fortunately, at 26 I encountered two 3D teachers who were very hands-on
about work, taught design skills as well as manual skills, were very no
nonsense about directing and reviewing work, and who were both
supportive and demanding of everyone. Timid, loud mouth, dilettante,
jock, redneck, radical, male, female, young, old, art major, PE major.
It just didn't matter. In the studio you all get muddy together. You
celebrate your successes and learn from your failures. Everyone learned
how to take care of the studio. It was OK to be a lefty and everyone
smudged.
The best part was that what happened in 5th grade , or first grade or
last year, just didn't matter anymore. You had work to do
Stephani Stephenson
Carlsbad,CA
steph@alchemiestudio.com
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