If I Don’t Make It
Sunday, 22. January 2017 23:40
“If I don’t make it, I can always teach.” Maybe, but you may not be any good at it—because it’s a different skill set. And you may not like it, because it’s not only a different skill set, it requires a different mindset.
And be assured, just because you’re good at one (producing art or teaching art), does not mean that you will be good at the other. In fact, I have recommended that certain people go into teaching who I would never recommend be performers; likewise I have suggested that others should set their goals on performing and forget the “security” of teaching.
And speaking of that whole teaching security thing, it doesn’t really exist. Teaching has become far less secure over the past 10 years for a number of reasons. And then there’s the educational bureaucracy, which has become far more onerous in roughly the same amount of time. These factors, taken together, make teaching in the arts a far less attractive occupation than it might have been several years ago.
“Well, if I teach, I will have time to do my art afterwards.” No, you won’t. Those who try this find that the only way to pull it off is to slack on one or the other or relegate one or the other to part-time status. Good teaching takes enormous time and preparation. Yes, this is true even in those studio courses where it seems is that all the instructor does is wander in and offer a few suggestions and some critiques. Any instructor worth his/her salt has already been thinking about members of the class and how best to facilitate their development. The class is merely an implementation of those strategies. Thus there is little time left for creating art.
Likewise, if you spend the majority of your time, effort, and ingenuity on producing your art, you will be less than a good teacher. Teaching requires just as much time, effort, and creativity as producing art, so when one spends all of that artistic capital on making art, there is less available for teaching. Students may not understand this until years later, if ever. They may never know they’ve been short-changed—until they try to compete with others who had teachers and coaches who were more concerned with training their students than with their own success in the artistic marketplace.
The other thing you will likely be after a day of either teaching or making art, is tired. You simply may have insufficient energy to do whichever one comes second, at least on a daily basis.
While it is possible to be a really good full-time teacher and a really good full-time artist at the same time, the individuals who can pull it off are very rare. Unless the teacher somehow combines teaching and making art, the quality of the art or volume of output is sure to suffer.
And that may not be a bad thing. The world can still enjoy the work of the artist/teacher, just not as much of it. In the meantime, the world gains the benefit of a person of a person who not only imparts information, but who attempts to shape the experiences of students so those students can realize their own potential, a person who guides, encourages, and challenges his/her students to become the artists and teachers of tomorrow. And those are valuable people.
Category:Education, Productivity | Comment (0) | Author: Jay Burton