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Reflections on Teaching

One of the best things about teaching has been looking at and talking about student work. Nothing better demonstrates the limitations of words than to see how a single word can mean so many different things to different people. The word is no more than a category for the radically diverse ways we experience it. Given the topic Isolation, particularly in the midst of the COVID pandemic, students created images of moving particularity, merging physical confinement with the psychological impact. No matter how different the details, everyone understood the feeling. This is what we share as a species and why art can help unify in a time when we desperately need it. As classes became more international, the universal feeling that is understood by the mind as a whole through art, connected us in our essence. Visual art is felt in the body which picks up the nuance in small variations that words can’t reach. Each work can stimulate new conversations. After talking about a Chinese student’s painting, she said, “Thank you guys. You described my heart.” Awash in a terrible worldwide focus on surface differences, art connects to the place that we are the same, a place crucial to reinforce right now. Art is not just about culture, it is a picture of human psychology. Teaching has been a way to demonstrate the joy of being involved, the pleasure of giving attention lavishly and like when watering a plant, fostering growth. Showering students with attention is the part I’ll miss most, to watch something ignite and spread as they feel seen through their work. Art helps us past the external shell to where the essence connects. It communicates through generations and widely varied backgrounds. Every artist is a teacher on some level, sharing their insights or questions to stimulate the mind of the viewer. An image can change how we see. Art students always make me optimistic. From a range of difficult circumstances, they willingly draw from the core and make beauty. Thinking about them right now makes me smile as so much individual work through the years floods through my awareness. We share art. We don’t have to own it. Once seen, it’s available in memory. An observation that reflects a point-of-view, window onto a philosophical stance, the feelings resonate beyond words, unifying a diverse group by putting the emphasis on what makes us human. This year’s speeches by students at graduation showed me we’re in good hands. Evidencing a broad, wise and compassionate perspective, their generation will responsibly evolve human minds, tapping the diversity of potential too long overlooked. In the past few years I’ve re-connected to a few students from every decade since the seventies and it startles me even though obvious that the young people I knew could be facing retirement, enjoying results of hard work in middle age, on down to very recent graduates. I feel so lucky to have been part of so many people’s beginnings. They all feel like family to me.