Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Green teacher

Today was my first day of teaching at the local pottery center, & I think it went pretty well. Not stellar, but not bad. For one thing I'm a novice teacher - I've taught kids at a summer camp handbuilding with clay. That's about the extent of it, and now I have two entirely different classes: adult clay building - a mix of hand building & throwing - & kids throwing.

The adult class consists of old-timers who have taken that same class together for months, perhaps years, and they all had an idea of what they wanted to do, they all had projects they were already working on. They're quite sociable and it seems they take the class simply for fun, to enjoy the company of their classmates, and to have someone to answer this classic question when they see something interesting in a picture: "How did they do that?" I can usually answer those questions, but for the remainder of the class, I'm not entirely sure what I should be teaching with everyone going in different directions. So I started out demonstrating how to make pots footed, similar to these works by Willi Eggerman & Tara Wilson, then socialized & answered sporadic questions the remainder of class, wondering how else to make myself useful as most of the students seemed to be fine with their current projects. Next week I plan to teach more on throwing, but of the two classes, it's the true beginners that I'm more concerned about...

Kids are a whole nother animal. I have a difficult time as it is enunciating precisely what I'm doing as I throw a pot, but to get an 11-year-old to simply center clay is a challenge. Any advice in this area is more than welcome. Do I need to watch every video I can of beginning pottery and teach all my friends & family to throw in order to become a good teacher? I'm sure that wouldn't hurt... so what videos would you recommend I check out from the local library?
 
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