what

Is there a right way to hold a pencil? I don’t believe there is a right way - any way is fine. The moment I suggest that there is a right way to hold a pencil, I cut out all sorts of possibilities.

Can my students really learn that there is no correct way to hold a pencil?

We can teach perspective and colour mixing, but these are science lessons.

The more I learn about art, the less I I know what art is. How can I teach what I don’t know?

Toulouse-Lautrec’s bowler and Van Gogh’s chair, the wheely chairs.

The art room is a paracosm of silly hats, plastic animals, bent brass instruments. We have the learning sofa, Toulouse-Lautrec’s bowler, Van Gogh’s chair and the wheely chairs. An antidote to the straight jacket of my school experience; subjugated to teachers will, afraid of retribution, bored, wanting and found wanting.

Blindfold walks and feelyboxes

Magnetic poetry and a white board

Now and then I try and teach in a suit, but it doesn’t suit. I am much less constricted in teeshirt and jeans. Who knows? The Breton shirt I wear, bought in an antique clothes shop in Toulouse, might once have belonged to Picasso.

Perhaps it is only in the art room at school that there can be a coming together of children’s public and Private identities. An anarchic antidote to other subjects areas where teachers wear ties and expect their students to tuck their shirts and opinions in.

The one thing that I don’t want my students to do is to conform.

Teenagers need to conform, have to conform - urban tribalism, identity - for some conformity and identity mean non-conformity.

There is a zing in the click of a HYPERLINK

A Magic:

“Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It’s about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we’re just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television’s saying, everything’s saying ‘That’s the world.’ And it’s not the world. The world is a million possible things.”

Salman Rushdie talks with Terry Gilliam
- accessed 20/4/210 - http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_gilliam


The following is a letter written to me by one of my students from many years ago:

Today while faffing around on Facebook I saw your message about your memory book. I'd never even read the Sidcot page before now so I'm glad I stumbled upon it. In 1985/1986 I was Emma Irvine Robertson (not expecting you to remember me!). I didn't even do art at GCSE or A-level (I was in the first cohort to GCSEs in 1988).

My memory concerns about 10 minutes in one art lesson. It was part of a series of lessons focusing on more abstract work. I can't remember the details exactly I think it was something like -- one week we had to do our painting incorporating some 2-D shapes and then the next week you announced we had to do another painting but this time "the complete opposite" -- whatever we took that to mean. So while my first painting was angular/triangular/dark (I can still picture it clearly); my second was round and organic/circular/light. The second week you strolled over to take a look and at your praise was so heartfelt and genuine that moment was really lingered. It was a time in my life when I wasn't particularly happy so for that lesson than I was floating. You weren't a teacher who threw praise about carelessly as some do -- in fact on occasion you could actually be a bit of a grumpy puss -- but when you gave praise it was golden. It was one of the clearest memories from my own education -- more than 20 years ago.

This story ends better if I'd exhibited at the Royal Academy last summer but no. I haven't picked up a paintbrush years (other than to wash a child's). However I was a teacher in the London from 1995 -- 2004 ending as a deputy head and the notion of "genuine" praise quotation has definitely been a big part of my teaching philosophy. I'm now a parent of two (Josie is two months old) and it's part of my mothering too. So thanks being real and saving praise for the stuff that matters.