Process is the mother of retention.
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Before I finally grew up in my late 30's, I was never one to take other people's advice. I was too busy carrying around the chip on my shoulder to listen to what others had to say, particularly anyone in a position of authority. There are a few reasons I developed that chip in the first place, not the least of which that I was apparently born wearing it. My dear departed grandmother had something to do with it as well. All my childhood (again, till my late 30's) I resented her advice, even when her advice was apt, which was often. Too many years of "Let me tell you how you should have done it" lectures coupled with things like regularly waiting for me to reach the end of the driveway on my way to play baseball with my best friend before calling out to see if I had brushed my teeth (which I hadn't), then demanding to "show me your choppers" left me aloof in my openness to suggestions.
There are a few pieces of advice that my Dad offered across my years under his roof that stuck, making a permanent impression that only now, as an actual adult, do I fully recognize their impact. For instance, when we had "the talk" about sex it was like this:
"You know what a rubber is? If you stick your dick in anything, use one. Don't get anyone pregnant. It will fuck up your life." It may sound crass but I will tell you this, I never got VD and I didn't have a baby until my wife and I were ready. My son and I will have a similar talk at some point this summer. Or next.
There was also "If you leave me alone I'll leave you alone. If you fuck with me I'll kill you." That would be the universal "you" not me, and I probably heard that for the first time when I was 6 or 7 years old, then up until maybe last year. It is a maxim delivered honestly, I do believe it is a truism for my Dad. I have no idea if it has ever been tested, but if I found out it had I would not be at all surprised.
Another lasting wisdom was "If you end up with three or four good friends in your life you are doing just fine." This one confused me when was younger, but by the time I was in High School, seriously studying art in preparation for college, it began to make sense. I had a lot of "friends" but when it came down to brass tacks, I realized I had 3 or 4 people who I considered brothers and sisters. They were the people who are still in my life today, the ones I called when my kids were born. These are the folks who know me best and all but one of them are artist I have worked with since high school, shard studios with as adults, and collaborated with professionally once we had careers. All of them them are very much like me in the sense that they are a little fucked up, were not the stars of the Art Department, and earned their artistic stripes through Process.
Kids learning a lesson in order out of chaos.
Like I said, I was never the Art Star. As a student in a Very Competitive Arts Magnet High School of the Fame generation, there was a lot of pressure to be that Art Star and I knew early on I wasn't it. It bothered me at the time because I was late on the scene to that school arriving in 11th grade after two other High Schools in suburban Chicago (the first one of which I was expelled from). My drawing skills were not as advanced as others nor were my paintings skills. I did, however, have an eye for Mixed Media at a time when others in my world were only dabbling, and that led me directly into Printmaking. There I found my passion.
Printmaking is process oriented and it was in the depths of this process that I found my craft. Refining images both on plate and paper made sense to me. The relationship between the image and the ink was like the push and pull between the natural world of my beloved Massachusetts farm life and the unsupervised, juvenile delinquent urban grit of my adolescence in Houston. It was a medium I could control, where drawing skill was dwarfed by my skill at color and form. I could hide my deficiencies (and insecurities) under layers of process that came together as actual Art.
When I hit college at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University I found a serious and professional Print studio and was in my element. My love of process deepened with an introduction to advanced mediums like stone lithography and by having access to massive presses. I probably spent more money on Rives BFK than I did on beer those 5 years, and I used to drink a lot of beer.
SO, by the time I had made if back to my old HS as a teacher, some seven years after I graduated, I was carrying not just a budding passion for teaching but a budding passion for teaching through process. Now, I taught a lot of printmaking during my four years at my alma mater, but I also taught Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Art History and Mixed Media. I taught every grade level, 9-12, and no matter the course it was in Process that I was able to reach my students most deeply.
A major component of that skill can be found in Empathy. Art schools are full of fucked up kids, the bright and talented as well as the abused and rejected. Our school was the place she weirdoes and geeks are the cool kids, but that doesn't erase the time served in getting there. Having been one of those students. I got it in a way that other teachers may not have been able. I was able to take kids on a journey through artistic process, over weeks of work and incorporating all kinds of tangential subject matter, and come out the other end watching them rising under their own propulsion. It was an immensely rewarding job and one that has stuck with me, much like my father's advice (which I actually embraced) destined to inform my professional career in ways that couldn't be foretold.
Sometime you have to just say "fuck it" and print.
And here I am some 18 years after coming back to my HS as a teacher, and I am using the same methods, the same processes, to work mental magic on the little ones. Process is something that rarely makes an appearance int he Elementary Art room, mostly because it is
really fucking hard and takes a tone of commitment to pull off with school aged kids. Even the older ones, like 4th and 5th graders naturally balk at anything that requires long attention. Kids this age are used to starting something and finishing ti quickly, and this is quite natural. By their very natures elementary school children are about exploring options, finding things they like (for the moment) and discarding that for which they have no use. So getting kids to slow down long enough to experience some process takes a commitment by the teacher to see them through, and to execute that maneuver in a way that retains their interest.
Part of what got me hired in my current job, and frankly in all of my teaching jobs, is my passion for engaging kids with professional tools and mediums. I do not dumb things down. I believe in real paper, real paints, real charcoal and real ink. I will go to my grave believing that kids deserve to experience making art not by "make and take" one-off projects but be following through, from beginning to end, in the process that allows art to happen. It's visceral and it changes how people see their world, which means it changes how kids think. And so many childhoods in a school like mine, a Title I campus populated largely by Latino immigrant children, are made up of hard truths and even harder realties. These are the kids I have a passion (and a talent) for reaching. For these kids art can be therapy, in fact should be therapy, if applied at all correctly.
When we slow things down and break them into stages over the course of a week or two weeks these kids are able to slow down enough to recognize when the lightbulbs are going off. They make connections between cause and effect and that can be carried over into the real work of my teaching: breaking through the walls kids put up between themselves and everyone else, the walls that are necessary to protect their Selves from the realities of lives marked by violence, abuse, disappointment and neglect. It is here that the teacher can gain a students' trust (through offering respect) and shed light on ways of seeing that had theretofore been unseeable. The big picture potential is astounding.
It's like a can opener for the mind.