What
College Teachers expect
from incoming High School Art Students
First of all, these are community college
teachers and in many cases teaching students that were not accepted to
four-year schools and students striving for, that most Californian of
all things, a second chance. That said, many of these students are very
hard working and very talented with ambitions and skill sets that would
not be out of place at Art Center or The Chicago Institute of Art, in
fact some of these students go on and are successful at these prestigious
schools.
I frankly was expecting to be told about specific skill sets that the
students should be given in order to be prepared for more advanced training.
In fact two specific skill sets were mentioned as being the most valuable.
One was simply learning to ‘see’. One instructor was particularly
pleased when a student, after a session on lettering, saw for the first
time the arrow imbedded in the empty space of the FedEx logo. The other
skill set is Article
Continues
Freehand Drawing, although the instructor
was concerned that many students coming out of high school had the intention
of going directly into Life Drawing and the instructor felt responsible
to deny the students this, citing a need for additional training in freehand
drawing and a need for a greater maturity in the students before facing
their first nude model.
The other skill sets are, in some cases, universal and in other cases,
unique to studio classes in what every subject.
Studio classes (or science labs) are unique opportunities to teach about
respect and care for materials. Simple things like keeping a workspace
clean, caring for and preserving brushes and organizing paints and other
materials. In fact, these kinds of lessons about materials are difficult
to teach in a conventional classroom setting with students facing forward
in rows and the only materials being, perhaps, pencils and paper. The
studio art classroom is not unique in schools for this benefit as it shares
this with laboratories settings, but the rewards of learning to respect
and care for materials will benefit students at least as much as being
able to write an understandable paragraph or use algebra to build an Excel
worksheet. Beginning early, teaching an elementary school student to organize
crayons by color will translate later directly into organizing files on
a computer’s desktop.
Lastly, the universals that every high school student needs to be reminded
of:
» Respect for the instructor
» Attendance
» Attention
Currently all teachers are faced with the same dilemmas; students taking
cell phone calls during class time, students using cell phone cameras
to photo nude models in life-drawing class to send to friends and students
sitting quietly text messaging and not paying attention to instruction.
In fact the college instructors from studio art, to art history to computer
design all felt that the cell phone is now their greatest problem. I don’t
know if any thing can be done about this, at least in life drawing the
teachers are authorized to confiscate cell phones if they see one. It
is at least worth while to begin informing students of their responsibilities
as early as possible, when cell phones begin appearing in the class room,
in early elementary school from my understanding.
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Read our April essay: Technological
Innovations in Art Educations
Read our March essay: Does Handwriting have
a Future?
Read our February essay: Copyright and trademark
for the art educator
Read our January essay: Counseling your students
on choices for Higher Education
Read our December essay: Why Teaching Visual
Art is now a Necessity
Read our November essay: Teaching Collage as Social
Critic
Read our October essay: The Place of the
Body in Education
Read our September essay: The Ways Artists
Support Themselves
Read our August essay: Why students should copy
the great works
Read our July essay: Hidden Clues in Works of
Art
Read our June essay: The Mathematics of Art
Read our May essay: The Importance of School
Art Competitions
Read our January essay : Art History
and the Internet
Read our March essay: Ink Jet Printers
and the Color Wheel:
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