diary entry on my first day is class of grade 12
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September 8, 2009 found me in the lobby of a Canadian high school, eagerly anticipating my first day as a student in an adult art program. After doing a variety of painting and drawing classes when I was in my twenties, I had moved to mostly left-brain activities when I started undergraduate studies in 1972. Flash forward to 2006, when I started planning to retire from my position as professor at a Canadian university. My first step towards retirement was to start taking art classes, and I had taken almost four years of excellent instruction in water-colour painting, as well as classes in drawing and acrylics, through my local school board’s continuing education program. When I heard about a daytime program in visual arts for adults, consisting five mornings of classes a week, I decided to apply, got accepted, and completed the first year with very good results. I then started the second year and became a high-school dropout after one month.
I had expected to have mixed feelings about being an adult student in a program housed in a high school … and I wasn’t disappointed. After 22 years as professor in a graduate school of education, the same institution from which many teachers in this school board had received their B.Ed. and M.Ed. degrees, the role reversal was striking. But I fully accepted from the start that I was a beginner art student and entered the program with an open mind. Most teachers managed, most of the time, to make the switch between teaching adolescents in grades 9-12 and teaching adults aged 19-65+, but a minority made little effort to do so. On the first day of one class, the teacher prowled the room, sniffing the air, and then announced that teachers had the right to a classroom free of smells, so some people were in need of deodorant. This was not an auspicious start to that teacher’s future relationship with adult students.
From another perspective, when students acted like grade 12 students, or even 12-year-old children, as sometimes happened, teachers may have felt justified in treating them accordingly, although that resulted in a tense atmosphere not conducive to learning. All the textbook models of small group behaviour applied to our class. There were the leaders, the trend-setters, the peacemakers, the clowns, the insiders and outsiders, the over-achievers and under-achievers, overt and covert competitiveness, false modesty, arrogance, and learned helplessness, to name just a few of the dynamics that surfaced among this diverse group of adults. The last time I was a student in a mixed-ability classroom, I was about 11 years old, so all this came as a bit of a shock.
I had expected to have mixed feelings about being an adult student in a program housed in a high school … and I wasn’t disappointed. After 22 years as professor in a graduate school of education, the same institution from which many teachers in this school board had received their B.Ed. and M.Ed. degrees, the role reversal was striking. But I fully accepted from the start that I was a beginner art student and entered the program with an open mind. Most teachers managed, most of the time, to make the switch between teaching adolescents in grades 9-12 and teaching adults aged 19-65+, but a minority made little effort to do so. On the first day of one class, the teacher prowled the room, sniffing the air, and then announced that teachers had the right to a classroom free of smells, so some people were in need of deodorant. This was not an auspicious start to that teacher’s future relationship with adult students.
From another perspective, when students acted like grade 12 students, or even 12-year-old children, as sometimes happened, teachers may have felt justified in treating them accordingly, although that resulted in a tense atmosphere not conducive to learning. All the textbook models of small group behaviour applied to our class. There were the leaders, the trend-setters, the peacemakers, the clowns, the insiders and outsiders, the over-achievers and under-achievers, overt and covert competitiveness, false modesty, arrogance, and learned helplessness, to name just a few of the dynamics that surfaced among this diverse group of adults. The last time I was a student in a mixed-ability classroom, I was about 11 years old, so all this came as a bit of a shock.
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