Adventures in Teaching

I've never really wanted to be a teacher. I'd often been told that I should be a teacher, that I'd be good at it, that maybe I'd like it. But I never saw the appeal. Now that I am in grad school, I'm required to teach. Being a TA required me to grade papers and exams, hold office hours, even lead a discussion session once a week for 3 different classes. The experience, while terrifying, didn't even hold a candle to my other teaching requirement. As a Gluck Fellow, I would be sent to 10 local schools to teach elementary students about art history. Little kids? Me?

Because I've been so interested in the Arts and Crafts movement and the uncomfortable relationship between art and craft, I decided that would be my angle. I decided to do a two-part presentation, which meant I only had to go to 5 local schools 2 times each. During the first part, I talked about art and asked the kids if art was just painting and sculpture or if it could be other things too. We then talked about craft and used textiles as an example. I showed them how to spin, knit, and weave and showed them both practical and artistic applications for these techniques. Then, in the second part, each kid got to weave their own project.

This was a big undertaking and required a lot of prep. First, I had to find a weaving store. When I worked at the Weavers Guild of Minnesota I had access to any kind of weaving product, yarn, and advice I could imagine. I never really understood why visitors to the Guild were so impressed and jealous of our facilities. But after a frustrating search for supplies here, it started to make sense. The only weaving "store" I could find was in the Costa Mesa garage of a 90-something year old man.

The store reminded me of Patty Johnson's Color Crossing in Wisconsin -- if everything in Patty's store was coated in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. A few women were working on looms in the back. They eyed me suspiciously as I scanned the little old man's shelves for yarn that wasn't too thin or too overpriced. I reluctantly settled on carpet warp, priced only a few dollars too much per cone. The carpet warp, I decided, would make a tolerable little sample warp for my rigid heddle frame loom. I would warp that up to show the kids how a "complicated" loom worked very similarly to the "simple" looms they'd be using.

I went into Guild withdrawal again when I realized I didn't have a warping board to wind my warp. I remembered one of the Guild members telling me I could measure my warp using a door knob -- a concept I thought I understood, but really didn't. But the idea inspired me to use the many doorknobs on my bathroom cabinets as a makeshift warping board. Of course I couldn't get the nicely wound strings off the cabinets without cutting them and could only wind about 15 at a time, but I did end up with a workable warp.

The next step was to put it on the loom. I never paid much attention to the frame loom warping process and regretted that within minutes. I had no idea what I was doing. The loom kept moving on the table, I couldn't reach the strings very well, the heddle kept falling down -- how could anyone think this was any fun? I had an excellent manual but a manual can't point out mistakes or offer suggestions for setting up a work space. I missed my Guild.

After a few nights of struggling through this hellish project, I got to the weaving portion. Weaving itself seemed easy after all of that and I was starting to feel confident that I could at least teach the little kids to weave. Chad and I started the daunting task of making 150 cardboard looms. We cut them to size, made 18 notches in each, and warped them one by one, taping the ends of the strings in back. I cut roll after roll of Walmart super-saver yarn into thousands of 3-foot long strings, begged The Yarnery for plastic needles since I could not find them online or anywhere in LA, purchased a few boxes of plastic forks, and set out on my mission.

My first pupil was Chad, who excelled. He helped me make a dozen sample projects to show the kids what they could do. Teaching Chad came in handy; at the end of my presentations, I lost my voice and recruited him to help me with the kids.

Next came kids. They loved weaving and only a few had ever done something like it before. I heard that weaving became the new hobby for many of these students and looms were seen at recesses, field trips, soccer games, and homerooms. I had been nervous that the boys wouldn't like the project, but they seemed to take to it faster and with more enthusiasm than the girls. The boys experimented with stripes -- horizontal and vertical -- and knots and open spaces whereas the girls wanted to make "perfect" projects and worried incessantly about any little mistake. One boy was so excited about weaving that he went home between the first and second parts of my presentation and made his own loom and wove his own project before I even showed him how to do it. One girl was so excited about my short knitting demonstration she stayed after school and begged me to teach her. She was knitting by herself within 5 minutes!

I don't know if I am cut out to be a teacher, but I must admit that this was a much more rewarding experience than grading all those papers! Maybe little kids aren't so bad after all...