First day of class (11/8/05)
First day of class
Mother of god.
I am not sure what sank in and what never even hit their ears. I do however have at least two students that seem to get it, and they seem to want to know more. The rest I cant tell. Not yet anyway. I was set to discuss ways to photograph these major projects, I was pretty sure I would be spending my time trying to pare down their ideas into something that would be manageable in 5 days. Instead I spent the whole day fighting for their attention and trying to make their ideas bigger.
I am not saying it was a failure or that there is anything wrong with the class. I will however say that Plan A is the first one to fail. It seems as though there was some confusion as to the purpose of my class. Some students thought it was a technical training course on photography in general. Others wanted to learn particular things about photography. What they don’t seem to want to learn about is how to use photography as a voice for or against issues that are affecting them daily. The media here is state run, IE censored, stifled crap. There are so many things that affect them every day and no one in power asks for the younger generations opinion or thoughts on them. For a short period of time (right effing now) UNICEF has the powers that be with bended ear and interested eyes. We are here to give the kids that chance to show how they see the issues and what impact is has on them, what they feel can be done etc. I have three students that are interested in photographing flowers.
I remember once at dinner with my uncle Joe and aunt Caroline, discussing with them the idea of having a quantifiable measure of success at the end of job, something to measure your progress on, Joe smiled and said something about having 30 students staring blankly back at him in June.
I get it Joe.
I now apologize to every teacher I ever rolled my eyes at, stared past and ignored.
When I did get the kids to tell me what they wanted to learn it was overwhelmingly about the technical side of photo. So I spent about an hour running through your eyes work, aperture, shutter speed, film speed, depth of focus and the like. It’s amazing how fast you can bore the hell out of a group of kids. SO I told them to start thinking about what they wanted to photograph and began to work with that in mind.
I realize now that this was where I went very wrong.
Teaching is seems to be like cooking, there is only so much improvisation that can work before it all goes to hell.
Tomorrow may well be day one take two.
Oh I will learn em!
Mother of god.
I am not sure what sank in and what never even hit their ears. I do however have at least two students that seem to get it, and they seem to want to know more. The rest I cant tell. Not yet anyway. I was set to discuss ways to photograph these major projects, I was pretty sure I would be spending my time trying to pare down their ideas into something that would be manageable in 5 days. Instead I spent the whole day fighting for their attention and trying to make their ideas bigger.
I am not saying it was a failure or that there is anything wrong with the class. I will however say that Plan A is the first one to fail. It seems as though there was some confusion as to the purpose of my class. Some students thought it was a technical training course on photography in general. Others wanted to learn particular things about photography. What they don’t seem to want to learn about is how to use photography as a voice for or against issues that are affecting them daily. The media here is state run, IE censored, stifled crap. There are so many things that affect them every day and no one in power asks for the younger generations opinion or thoughts on them. For a short period of time (right effing now) UNICEF has the powers that be with bended ear and interested eyes. We are here to give the kids that chance to show how they see the issues and what impact is has on them, what they feel can be done etc. I have three students that are interested in photographing flowers.
I remember once at dinner with my uncle Joe and aunt Caroline, discussing with them the idea of having a quantifiable measure of success at the end of job, something to measure your progress on, Joe smiled and said something about having 30 students staring blankly back at him in June.
I get it Joe.
I now apologize to every teacher I ever rolled my eyes at, stared past and ignored.
When I did get the kids to tell me what they wanted to learn it was overwhelmingly about the technical side of photo. So I spent about an hour running through your eyes work, aperture, shutter speed, film speed, depth of focus and the like. It’s amazing how fast you can bore the hell out of a group of kids. SO I told them to start thinking about what they wanted to photograph and began to work with that in mind.
I realize now that this was where I went very wrong.
Teaching is seems to be like cooking, there is only so much improvisation that can work before it all goes to hell.
Tomorrow may well be day one take two.
Oh I will learn em!
posted by davidlang at 12:03 AM
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