Often, my students provoke me to be more creative - a push to see if I can engage them on a deeper level, meet them where theyre at and in turn push them past what they think their limit is. I am finding that they are better at pushing me then I am at pushing them. They are teaching me & testing me. It is a challenge. As an artist, I dont find it to be my calling to teach and Ill be honest and admit that it would be awesome to just be able to be an artist and not have to supplement my income with teaching. But as I often think when working with young people, Welcome to the real world. People are going to challenge you and if you dont have people who challenge you in your vicinity, you probably arent growing at a decent rate. I come from a family of teachers. I suppose there is an element of not being able to escape what you come from here. I managed to avoid the traditional route of going to school for four years to get a degree and then become a teacher and yet, here I am ... teaching. Id prefer to call it something else mostly because of the responsibility of teaching and the great demands and obstacles that consume a teachers life. Im not convinced that I can change someones life or make it better in any way but I do think that the art of teaching can lead a student to a sense of self and allow them to empower themselves on a daily basis. In the end, its they who do the work. Its our job to present ideas, encourage, guide when necessary and not put them in a box and maybe sometimes its our job to make them mad so that they can find passion to push themselves past their perceived limits. This is what they do for me. Now, I have to rise to the occasion they present and represent to the fullest. Yesterday and today, we took lyrics from a famous MC and cut up the words to create new pieces of our own and also added visual elements to those new word structures. It was an internal process, forcing us to look within and take something that already existed and turn it into our own. They surprised me with their creations and hopefully they surprised themselves.
Posted on: Tue, 13 May 2014 20:56:14 +0000
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