Nellie on her growing understanding of teaching Nelart

Nellie

I came to Christel House thinking I would spend my semester teaching art. I had this image in my head of gliding into the art room each morning with a colorful scarf on and I’d pass on knowledge, skill, and passion for art onto pupils who would soak it up. When I walked into the class on my first day through the reality sunk in, I was out of my league. The 10th grade students were busy sat work on paintings that made my stop in my tracks. (See photos below to understand the caliber of work we’re talking about here).

What could I possibly teach these students when I couldn’t do that myself?  So I changed my attitude. I shelved the imperialist notion that just because I was good at art that I’d be able to teach it and I picked up the pencil as a student. Since then whenever I sat in on one of Ms. Viv’s art classes I did the exercises as the students did, I paid close attention to her lessons and soaked up every melodic word she spoke.

 Then came yesterday. The 8th grade class did a fun exercise where they did a quick sketch of a still life set up on the table and then after three minutes shifted seats to the right and worked on their neighbor’s paper, shifting to the left every couple minutes. The kids loved it. They had such focus on the work that when it came time to shift they didn’t want to put their pencils down. The exercise was brilliant because it enabled to look at the work with a critical eye, compare it to what they were actually seeing without frustration that they weren’t doing it right. I was circling like a hawk around the room, as teachers do, just observing their work. While standing behind one student I thought, ‘Oh, she’s pushing too hard on her pencil, your sketch should be the lightest part of your piece.’ A moment later Ms. Viv walked behind her and said verbatim what I had thought. As I walked by another student I though how he was looking too much at his paper, not observing, but drawing from memory, and as Ms. Viv passed him, again she said exactly as I had thought. After a few more of these instances happened, I realized that I knew what I was doing. When I passed another student who I’m jovial with and saw that she was struggling with where to begin on a tricky part I told her what I remembered Ms. Viv saying, to start at the top of the object, place it in proportion to the others, then work down. She listened and jumped right in. I moseyed a bit more then asked another student if the shape she had just drawn as the lid was really what she saw, she noticed her error and corrected it. Ms. Viv overheard my appraisals and encouraged me to keep it up. It dawned on me that ‘I can do this.’ And although my immediate future doesn’t contain being an art teacher anymore (more to come on this in another blog), I renewed my confidence in the idea that I would definitely be able to learn enough to one day become one.