teaching-week, and I am feeling reflective.
I am moved by the gravity of each student’s
personhood. Does that even make sense?
Today, I led a classroom of 20 students through
their first encounter with baling wire, with the intent to craft life-size
self-portraits from this snaking, slender, wily material. [Have you ever messed
with baling wire? It is greasy and sort of unyielding. It cuts your fingers,
callouses them, and requires not one, but two
pairs of needle-nosed pliers to be attached soundly back to itself, piece by
piece.] In addition to using this recalcitrant metal to craft self-portraits, my
students’challenge was to find a symbol representing something really intrinsic
to each of their natures, and to incorporate that symbol as a repeating element
in their compositions.
I spent 3 hours this morning making my way around the
3D Design classroom, entering into each student’s imagination and creative
process one at a time – inching bare feet over the landscape of each student’s
questions, hovering a palm over sparks of poetry trembling in the static dark of
their brain-storms. This approach to teaching necessitates deep empathy,
a practice way more exacting and way more serious than
sentimentality. I am teaching (secretly, sort of) to
their –well, to that most remote, unabashed, intrinsic inner chamber within each
student where something beautiful and unique in all the world resides. I am
foolish enough to imagine that the world needs
what each of these inner chambers holds, and sparkle-headed enough to believe
that I can tease out a little of this prime real estate during my 16 week
journeys with college students, and during my 8-week journeys with adult
community center students.
It’s the college students I’m thinking of today.
So many of them are so young – 19, 21, so fresh and gelatinous and quixotic.
Some of them seem astonishingly weathered for their age – I am thinking of one
student in particular, who wants to help battered women heal when she completes
her degree in social work, who returns from break smelling of cigarette smoke,
and who chose as her symbol a slender ring with green gemstone given to her by
her son (how old can she be to have a son old enough to give her a ring, I
wonder?). I can only imagine what she’s seen, what she’s experienced, what
motivates her career choice – but I can sense the weight of it in the
hoarseness of her voice, and in the way she takes my art-interpretation
questions so literally, answering with almost defiant intensity ([Me, to the class:]"What do you
feel when you look at Van Gogh’s gaze in this self-portrait?"...[Her response:]"He’s like…'Back
off –' …It’s like, he’s like, ‘Don’t come any
closer.’…").
I secretly love this young woman – I love her strength, her proud woundedness,
which she imagines is invisible. I secretly want this ephemeral encounter with
wire and self-portraiture to redeem some small part of her – to pull it up to
the surface the way a wayward chunk of Styrofoam, dislodged from a
disintegrating dock, might draw a sunken ring back up to a lake’s surface, were
the ring tethered to the Styrofoam by a thread of nylon kite-cord…Are you
following my metaphor?
A broken-down dock is imperfect enough, and a
floating dock buoyed by Styrofoam is a second-class citizen in a world of
first-class stationary wood docks. Take a dislodged chunk of weather-beaten foam
from that already-second-class dock, and picture it (miraculously, happenstance-ically…)
tied to a ring by a trail of nylon cord. Why this would exist is irrelevant. The
image is perfect in my mind, so I’m convinced of its integrity. And what would
enable the Styrofoam chunk in question to suddenly pull a submerged ring it was trailing
up to the water's surface, is also moot, because I just know it could. And I feel art
projects can be like this – like the most misshappen, most-pathetic-
yet-hopeful little life rafts you could ever imagine, with tender kite-string tails
trailing behind them, extended toward anything in need of
pulling-up. They're often clunky, but their heart is in
the right place, and they're more powerful than
you think.
Which is to confess to a renegade-ically
unapologetic, sacred certainty, that a dumb art project in an intro-level
college art class can redeem some humble parcel of real estate within a student’s…I don’t
know…soul? [There – I said it.] These are dangerous, preposterous words
with no place in a conventional list of collegiate “learning objectives”.
Just what do I mean by "redeem"? When I looked up the definition (in that
sort of lazy, 21st C Googling-kind-of-way that turns scholars' stomachs), I resonated
most with number six, "To set free; rescue...":
re·deem(r-dm)
tr.v. re·deemed, re·deem·ing,
re·deems
1. To recover ownership of by paying a specified
sum.
2. To pay off (a promissory note, for
example).
3. To turn in (coupons, for example) and receive
something in exchange.
4. To fulfill (a pledge, for example).
5. To convert into cash: redeem stocks.
6. To set free; rescue or ransom.
7. To save from a state of sinfulness and its
consequences. See Synonyms at save1.
8. To make up for: The
low price of the clothes dryer redeems its lack of special
features.
9. To restore the honor, worth, or reputation of:
You botched the last job but can redeem yourself on
this one.
Today I am grateful for my job as a teacher of
art, which, for all its underpaying, overworking, lack of benefits,
competitiveness, and long-term instability, affords me this precious intimacy
with the most noble, vulnerable, and beautiful dimensions of these handfuls of
human beings I am brought into contact with one semester at a time. Today I am
reminded of how my job is not really a job, but a calling, and I am content to
feel really rich after a full day of showing up to answer that call, with no
spoon for my scarfed-down-between-classes tuna and yogurt (because I forgot it
on the cutting board at home this morning, in spite of a hand-written note to
the contrary), and no time to pee, and no guarantee that I spent enough quality
time with each student for them to proceed with confidence on their work during
the five days until we meet again.
Still and all, today, I am grateful to be here, at a point in my life where I
have this role to play and have earned the right to play it and I get to do what
I love for some money and there seems to be some kind of need I get to sort of
fill. Today, just this feels abundant.