college – Thoughts from Rose Avenue

My brilliant friend Lisa Rothman — entertainer, entrepreneur, and corporate trainer — recently left a comment that got me thinking. (If you find Lisa’s name familiar, it’s probably because she leaves thoughtful comments on pretty much everything I post here.) “I would love to live in a society,” she said, “[that’s] structured around people being able to spend all their time doing the things that they are really good at and enjoy doing.”

I would, too. I’m not entirely sure how that would work, given some serious obstacles:

The things that people enjoy doing are not necessarily the things that they’re good at, and vice versa.
There is likely to be much disagreement about what it means to be good at something, and who is and isn’t.
The things that people enjoy doing don’t necessarily benefit anyone other than themselves, and in some cases might even cause harm.
It’s not at all certain that the things people are good at, or the things they like to do, are evenly distributed enough to ensure that all necessary tasks get done. (How many people like cleaning toilets?)

Nevertheless, I do think that principle could be applied more often than it is. One place to start might be an area where I have some experience: higher education.

Community colleges, such as the one at which I was a faculty member, have been put under great pressure to model themselves after fast-food corporations. Just as McDonald’s enforces uniformity among its retail outlets, making sure that a hamburger sold at a McDonald’s in Kansas City tastes exactly like a hamburger sold at a McDonald’s in Miami, community colleges are supposed to require uniformity in their curriculum and in the people who teach it. A student who takes English 101 from one instructor is supposed to have exactly the same experience, and (measurably!) learn exactly the same things, as a student who takes the same course from another instructor. The course outline has been rigorously developed and approved by a committee, and it must be adhered to.

Naturally, there are good reasons for this demand for uniformity. Students who enroll in an advanced course must all be presumed to have received equal preparation in their earlier courses. Transfer students must have taken courses at their first school that are aligned with those as their next school. Students who graduate with the same degree must possess the same knowledge and skills, or else the degree has no meaning.

But it’s clear that something precious is being lost here: the value of each individual teacher’s life experience. In Lisa’s words, every instructor has something different that “they are really good at and enjoy doing.” Wouldn’t the students benefit if the teacher were free to teach that? For example, I’m no expert in desktop printing, because nearly all of my Photoshop work is intended for use online, but I have to teach it anyway because it’s part of the curriculum. I have lots of experience in preparing graphics for video, but I can’t share that experience because it’s not included in the official course outline. Because of my background in theater, I enjoy creating projections for stage productions, but that’s obviously not thought of as a mainstream activity.

What makes this particularly sad is that the specific topics that are being taught don’t matter much. I’ve always told my students, “Everything you do here is going to be obsolete in ten years.” What they really need to learn is how to learn — how to be curious, how to think critically, how to take responsibility for and pride in their work, how to start with fundamental principles and apply them to new situations. The actual subject matter of the course is just a vehicle for passing on those skills. So why can’t the curriculum flow naturally from where the instructor’s heart is?

When I think of teachers who have influenced me in the past, I rarely remember anything specific that they taught me — instead, I remember what sort of people they were, what they valued, and how they approached life. My education came simply from being in the room with them. Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of taking English 101, a college student could take a course called “A Semester with Professor So-and-So”?

Oddly for someone whose work and hobbies always revolved around creative endeavors, I never thought much about art. I grew up drawing, painting, writing, and making music, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to call any of those things “art”; they were basically ways to get approval and attention. In high school, college, and young adulthood, I was an actor, director, playwright, and mime, but I saw those as means of entertainment (for the audience) and emotional development (for me). In my twenty years as a freelancer, I did scriptwriting, graphic design, animation, and video, but that was just work I did to make a living. If you’d asked me what all these things had in common, I would have said that I was simply making use of skills that I was lucky enough to have.

That all changed in 2003, when I was hired by Chabot College to lead a new Digital Media program, teaching students how to use creative software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver. I became a full-time faculty member in a division that was known at the time as Fine Arts, and my colleagues were painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The visual arts faculty didn’t know what to make of me; they thought of me as “the computer guy.” (Of course, when I got to know people in the Computer Science department, they thought of me as an art guy.) Having had no professional training in either computers or the arts, I just made things up as I went along.

Toward the end of my second year at Chabot, it was announced that there would be a faculty art show in the division’s recently opened art gallery. Assuming that it had nothing to do with me, I paid no attention — until I received official word that as a member of the Fine Arts faculty, I was expected to participate. This threw me into a panic. “I’m not an artist!” I said. I didn’t know what I could possibly do that would be considered art.

“So, what is art?” I asked my friend, the art history professor.

“Generally, art is anything that’s made by an artist,” she said. We both agreed that wasn’t very helpful in my case.

The division dean gave me more practical advice. “Just do whatever you normally do, and call it art,” he said. So, since most of my recent career experience had been in video production, I made a video, which ended up being displayed on a computer monitor in the art gallery. People liked it. (In case you’re curious, it’s been preserved on YouTube, at https://youtu.be/Zrpje8NpdqE.)

Making the video was a strange experience, because every video I’d previously made had been an education or training program for a paying client. This one was being made for no reason at all. Based on this experience, I formulated a functional definition for myself: Art is anything I make that has no practical purpose.

That definition has served me well over the years, as I’ve continued to make visual images and videos with no practical value. I still hesitate to call them art, though. Real art, I think, has an emotional impact — it makes you want to look at it, and then leaves you changed in some way afterward. I have no reason to believe, or even any way to know, whether the things I make have that effect or not. So for lack of a better term, I refer to them as “art projects.”

(I have to admit that I have an underlying wariness of people who call themselves artists. That seems a bit self-aggrandizing. I’m more comfortable when people describe the activities that they actually do: “I’m a painter” or “I’m a dancer” or “I’m a musician.” Then it can be left to other people to decide whether those paintings or dances or musical performances qualify as art.)

I’ve retired from my tenured faculty position at Chabot College. I still teach an occasional course there as an adjunct instructor, but I feel less and less comfortable doing so. I always thought of myself as teaching a set of skills that the students could apply in any way they wanted — they could use them to do work for employers or clients, for example, or they could make art. The person who took my place as head of the Digital Media program has a different view; she’s very insistent that “these are art classes.” If, as my art history professor friend said, art is something made by an artist, then I have much more to learn before I can teach. Or I can just emulate Miss Bliss, the preschool teacher in Richard Thompson’s comic strip “Cul de Sac.” As her four-year-old students begin to go wild with glitter and glue, she cautions them, “Remember, creativity plus neatness equals art.” That’s my favorite definition by far.

Tag: college

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