Filed under: art institutions, education, theatre | Tags: Arts Education, cook, curriculum, education, teaching artist, theatre education
It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom but an interview about my time at BAM and a journey through some old files have gotten me thinking about it some. It feels like I miss it a little bit and I’ve been trying to work out what part of it is still calling to me.
I’m not nostalgic for being in a classroom. I suppose I miss being with the students some but I don’t miss the toxic environments that most schools tend to be. I think what I really miss is inventing exercises. That’s the creative bit. For me, it was a satisfying stretch of my artistic muscles to create an experience for students that will help them discover something about a work of art. I was pretty good at it, I think.
Was everything I made up a hit? Hell no. There’s a high rate of failure in creating curriculum, especially when results can be so uneven. I’ve taught exercises that were tried and true across many schools and then, for whatever reason, it would just tank in a random class, for no obvious reason. Teaching Artistry can be a little like stand-up comedy in that success and abject failure are on either side of a very thin knife and you can never be sure your best bit is going to work.
But still – I made up some good stuff, some of it as ephemeral as an improvised scene and some of it has made its way through the channels such that I sometimes found my own invented exercise coming back to me from elsewhere.
Arts Education – and maybe just education in general – tends to be a haphazard collection of what a teacher has learned from elsewhere. In classrooms, teachers are hungry for things to try, games to explore, warm-ups to add to their repertoire. These are the things that can keep an arts teaching experience fresh – especially for a teacher who has a room full of expectant young people to teach and hours of class to fill.
Good exercises are good food to hungry teachers. And food is actually a good analogy, I think. For me, some parts of teaching are like being a chef. I’m creating new things, putting unexpected ingredients together, presenting new ways of looking at old material. And in other moments, teaching can be more like being a line cook – just getting the menu items the way they’ve always been prepared on the table as fast as possible.
So what I’m realizing is that I miss being a chef sometimes though not being a line cook. This is actually one of the things that made me quit my job at BAM back in 2013, even though it felt like an artistic home and the place where I did some of my best work. The main program I worked for changed from one where they needed three consummate chefs to one where they just needed some line cooks to execute some dishes they’d hand down to us. And after 13 years of cheffing, I just couldn’t become a line cook.
For an administration, standardizing the curriculum is very sensible. They can clearly articulate their product. They know that each classroom is getting more or less the same experience. They can, more or less, mass produce an arts education experience. You don’t need to pay chef wages. You can even hire people who’ve never cooked before and just give them the recipe. I understand the appeal. Divorcing the art on the stage from the work in the classroom means you can replicate the same thing over and over. You can have mass produced marketing materials. That’s all very convenient and I do understand why it seemed like the right thing to do. But to me, it was like taking a Michelin star restaurant where a chef tailors the meal to the diners and turning it into a McDonalds. And from what I understand, even the McDonalds is out of business there now.
I suppose when I think about the circumstances under which I would return to teaching, it’s clear I could only come back to a place that hires chefs. I’m not interested in being a line cook at McDonalds. Or, given that it seems to be the invention of curriculum that still interests me – maybe I should just write a cook book.
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