I am fairly new to the world of teaching, having resisted it for many years. During my high school art classes, I had vowed that I would never become a teacher. My experiences with my high school art teacher had been largely negative, and I refused to join her ranks, believing that if I did, I'd only end up like her. If, and only if, I did decide to teach, I promised myself that I would be a better teacher than any of the ones I'd had in the past. This resistance lasted until after I had finished my undergraduate studies in art. I found myself floundering around after graduating, unsure of what to do with my life. Eventually I got a job at a local museum and decided to go to graduate school for Museum Studies. I was assigned a work study job in the education department, which disappointed me at first. However, I came to greatly enjoy it, and now wish to be a museum educator myself. Previously, I thought I would want to be a curator or perhaps work in exhibits. My job in the education department changed my mind.

As I mentioned, I had a largely negative high school experience with art. My high school art teacher was never exactly fond of my work. She once called it “too commercial”, and to this day, I’m still not sure what that means, but her tone of voice indicated that it wasn’t a good thing. However, the worst, absolute worst thing she ever did was grab my pencil out of my hand and start drawing all over my paper, correcting what she saw as mistakes. Suddenly the drawing didn’t even look like mine anymore, it was a monstrosity created by her, in her style, to her specifications. At that moment, I vowed that, should I ever become a teacher, I would never, ever take a child’s pencil away from them and correct their work in that manner. My high school art class was the first class I had where I felt that I was finally being assigned projects that were worthwhile and involved real art history, and that illusion was quickly shattered when the teacher yanked my pencil away.

Class periods were spent largely in silence, and we were quickly shushed if we made too much noise. Occasionally our teacher would play new-age music of some sort, which I personally found more distracting than soothing. The teacher would wander among our desks, peering over our shoulders and feeling free to make her corrections on top of our work. She also clearly played favorites, but that actually annoyed me less than her constantly coming over to take my utensils away from me. The biggest problem, I realized, was that she believed that a student's work should match her examples exactly. If we were unable to reproduce her work in our assignments, she considered it a failure. She was not the last art instructor I would encounter in my life who believed that their idea of what my art should look like took precedence over my ideas. The three years I was in her class was incredibly frustrating, and I often found myself coming home from school very upset about her class.

There was one aspect of class that this teacher got right, and that was her attempt to teach us art history. Each day in class, a different print was hung on the board in her room, and we spent ten or fifteen minutes learning about it. At the end of the week, we had a ten question quiz over the works we had learned about. It was dry and dull, but at least I was being exposed to artists I'd never heard of. Before high school, I had attended a small Catholic school where art class consisted mostly of craft projects, with little to no art history taught. For example, I arrived at high school knowing about Van Gogh, but having never heard the word "Impressionist".

My family moved back to Lubbock after my junior year, and I had two art classes at Lubbock high. The teachers were nice, and I never felt stifled by them, but at the same time, there was zero actual education. Both classes involved working on whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, with no deadlines or requirements for subject matter or media. They were the freest art classes I'd ever had, but I craved some sort of structure. The classes were split about evenly between those of us who wanted a serious art class and those who just needed an art elective and used class time to goof off.

I was equally frustrated when I got to college and found resistance almost everywhere to the kind of art I wanted to make. I've always loved animation, comic books, and illustrations, but I was constantly discouraged from making art the way I wanted to. Illustration was especially looked down upon, I recall. Even now, in grad school, I've had an art class where the professor expected my art to look one way and was disappointed when I did it my way. There was an expectation that I would produce work that looked the way she imagined it would, and when I made something different, it wasn't well-received. I don't mean to sound as though I am unable to receive criticism, but I find it discouraging when someone expects your art to look a certain way and is critical of you when it doesn't match up with their own vision of your work. A more helpful approach is to explain what could have been done better, or what parts of the work could be refined, or changed in the future. Simply saying that someone's work doesn't look like you thought it would is not a helpful criticism.

My goal is to teach in a museum setting. I already teach somewhat regularly at the Museum of Texas Tech, where I am a student, and occasionally for the city museums. There is much more freedom teaching in a museum, where I can write my own lessons and plan my own curriculum without worrying about standardized testing or other requirements. I'm still learning about how to teach, and I'm still experimenting with the classes I have been teaching, but I believe that I've found a good method that involves presenting my students with some brief art history about what we're going to be learning, and room for them to experiment and become familiar with new media before completing a finished project that they are proud of. For drawing classes, where I have adults, I find that they're more timid about picking up charcoal or pastel for the first time, and are more comfortable if I stand up at the front of the room and draw along with them.

I feel that I should offer my students some of the structure they would find in a classroom, but without the stress of making their art for a grade. I want to be as encouraging as possible, so that the children and adults I work with don't end up having a negative perception of art teachers, and so that I don't discourage them from making their art. I feel that, while students do need to understand what they could do better, they also need to be nourished, so that they don't give up completely on making art. Beginning artists are already fragile enough because they often believe that they "can't do it". They're ready to give up before they've even begun, and if I as a teacher am not careful, I could be the person that causes that to happen.