Chapter 17: Teaching
"Old School New Art - Craftsmanship: Today's Avant-Garde" - Jeffrey T. Larson
Throughout life we acquire many skills and upon reflection, realize that most practical applications happen subconsciously and intuitively.
Take running, for example. We all know how to run. Some people can run very fast, fast enough for them to acquire time with a great coach. That coach will analyze every movement they make and most likely explain to them that for all of these years they have been doing it completely wrong. So what do they do? The first step is to just do what the coach says and be prepared for a hard and frustrating time ahead…old habits are hard to break. Step two is to conscientiously work on adapting the new skill until it becomes their new instinct.
Now fast forward a year or two. This person is way faster but today, for some reason, something’s off. They’re at the big track meet and it’s just not flowing and on top of that, their coach isn’t there. If they can’t consciously verbalize to themself all of the adjustments they painstakingly spent so much time learning so as to rationally think through and find their mistakes and adjust what is off, they lose. If while they had been learning and training with their coach they had also been coaching and teaching younger teammates, this information would not only exist in their muscle-memory, but would also be stored verbally in their mind.
At GLAFA we have all of the students critique each other. We tell the students being critiqued that unless something good is pointed out they don’t have to listen to a word being said because let’s be honest, that student that is teaching might not have a clue what they’re talking about. The benefit of this exercise is primarily for the one analyzing and verbalizing what they perceive needs to be done. As they say, you really don’t know something until you can explain it to a five year old.
The second benefit is that while it’s often difficult to see your own mistakes, they’re glaringly obvious in the work of the person next to you. Ego, bias, and characterization of the subject often get in the way of seeing nature truthfully. When you critique someone else’s work, it’s not yours - so who cares. Ego is not involved, you’re seeing it fresh and have not yet had the time to bring it into characterization.
You might be amazed listening to yourself explain what to do and realize how simple it really is. The trick, then, is to bring that ego-less objectivity back to your own work. Pretend it’s someone else’s and reap the benefits until you get in your own way again. This skill will serve you extremely well after graduation and you are working alone in your studio. You need to be your own coach. You need to be able to talk your way down a checklist to locate and adjust whatever the roadblock is. You need to be able to backtrack until you figure out just exactly where you took that wrong turn and got lost in the woods. So many of us are the intuitive types and while waiting for inspiration to appear, run around the woods with our heads cut off hoping to stumble back onto the path.
