A LONG OVERDUE THANK-YOU TO A&D Attending The High School of Art & Design during the early 1970’s gave me a chance to study movie production for two years with Tom Gartner – a wonderfully patient instructor and a heck of a nice guy too. After graduating in 1975 I was able to take those skills on to college, graduate with a degree in film production, and find post-production work freelancing on television shows, commercials, and music videos during the 1980’s. I worked on some major things too for the Grammys, Saturday Night Live, MTV, and Sesame Street to name a few. Pretty good so far but it gets even better. From there I became a NYC school teacher at PS41 in the Oceanhill/Brownsville section of Brooklyn teaching kids in grades K-8 about making movies and photography. In 1989 I hooked my school up with Kid Witness News (KWN), a hands-on video education program sponsored by Panasonic where we made videos that addressed numerous social issues including drug and child abuse, gun proliferation, and the plight of the elderly. Our KWN videos went on to win more than 30 international and national awards and were so highly regarded that a number of them were archived into the permanent research collection at the Smithsonian’s Museum Of American History in Washington, DC. We then went on to win the 1998 Computerworld-Smithsonian Award in Media Arts and Entertainment where our KWN program was chosen over National Geographic, CNN, and NASA’s Mars Mission Website for this prestigious award (I know this sounds crazy but watch the video clip). Even better, right? But the best was yet to come. After 25 years of teaching video at PS41 I finally retired last year and joined Facebook for the first time hoping to reconnect with a few of my former students. However, it wasn’t just a few as hundreds of my former students reached out to me recalling wonderful memories of their time in my class. Comments like, “You were the reason I went to college,” or “So many of the things you taught us I still use in my life today” and “You made a difference in so many of our lives by showing us a world that we could become a part of through hard work, determination and teamwork” flowed onto my Facebook timeline. I felt so honored as I always tried to make my class hands-on, fun, and educational as I based so many of my lesson plans on how I was taught movie production by Mr. Gartner at Art and Design. I also did my best to show my students things beyond their Brownsville neighborhood with trips to Manhattan and New Jersey, and places further away like Washington DC, Atlanta, Orlando, and yes, even Japan. And what wonderful careers many of them now have as Television Producers, Artists, Lawyers, Hospice Care Managers, Graphic Designers, Management Analysts, Criminal Investigators, EMT’s for the FDNY, Digital Music Production, and in The Military to name a few. Fantastic, right? I would doubt if more than a couple of my classmates even remember my name from my high school days at A&D as I was one of the quiet ones back then but my voice now speaks loudly through the lives of so many of my former students and it all was possible because of a class I took at Art and Design. The splash may be loud but the ripples speak louder. https://youtube/watch?v=prFw1aSNVW8&index=103&list=PL90CE1FA2BB1B416F
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 19:31:36 +0000
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