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"What
makes a good Art tutor? Why artistic skill alone isn't
enough.
It's rare to get bad tutors in adult education - they
just don't survive that long. If you're so bad that
you lose your students, then you simply won't have a
big enough class to make it financially viable to continue.
A handful do get away with it though. They turn their
classes into clubs for a small group of regulars, where
virtually no teaching takes place.
Don't
get me wrong; I'm all for clubs. Gathering together
to pursue a hobby is much more constructive than de-railing
trains or setting fire to hamsters. But if I see an
art class advertised, I want it to be a class. I don't
want it to be a club. I'm happy for it to have a club-like
atmosphere - friendly, welcoming and plenty of tea and
biscuits to keep you going, but I don't want a club.
I'm expecting tuition.
Whilst
a club posing as a class is a misdemeanour, there are
greater sinners out there. These are the miscreants
who sully the world of art education by committing such
foul misdeeds as using demonstrations - not to help
students by showing them what to do, but just to prove
how much better they are than their students. Perhaps
they think they're 'an artist', when they're supposed
to be a 'tutor'. They should be both. Right now they're
getting paid for being a tutor. If that wasn't bad enough,
there are also tutors who spend all lesson on their
own work whilst you flounder alone; others tell you
that they spent a zillion years perfecting their technique,
so how can you expect to do it on just two hours a week
when you don't do any homework? Hey, some of us have
jobs and family commitments.
Worst
of all are the tutors who do your painting for you.
Doing a painting for a student should carry a mandatory
gaol sentence. One former art tutor I spoke to said
that he used to have to force himself not to do it.
"It's so tempting. You can see exactly what they
need to do, could do it yourself in just a couple of
minutes, but you have to remember it's their work".
To my mind, the tutor who does your painting for you
is like the person in the pub who doesn't have a side
order of chips, but is happy to fork their way through
yours.
Infectious
enthusiasm
Luckily, these tutors are in the minority. They are
far outnumbered by the ones who enrich the lives of
the students in their classes. These are the committed,
highly motivated tutors, who see teaching as an integral
part of their work, rather than a chore that has to
be put up with when their own paintings aren't selling
too well. They think of their teaching as being a serious
business. I don't mean that they wander around classrooms
po-faced and quoting Seurat in the original French.
I mean that they actually get a buzz from what they
are doing.
One
highly respected tutor, who is also a leading artist
and illustrator in her own right, offers the following
opinion:
"One
of the scariest feelings for adults is the fear of failure.
Even worse, the thought of failure in front of a load
of strangers, all of whom MUST be better than oneself.
I try and think how I might feel starting a class in
Quantum Physics and Maths."
How
true. We don't like to fail. And yet, when we are learning
something new, there must be things at which we are
going to fall short. On the way, we make mistakes. It's
having the feeling of security that we are working in
an environment where we can make mistakes and they don't
matter that will help us to achieve something.
We
also need to know as much as we can about a class before
we join it. Especially as beginners, it is hard to know
what you want when you don't fully understand what your
choices are. What's more, it's sometimes hard to get
to the course you really want to get to, because it's
on the wrong evening.
On
the other side of the fence students' expectations are
often a problem. One tutor I spoke to commented on this:
"It takes time and patience. I compare it to
learning a language." We also need to be taught
that patience.
Of
course, many people are extraordinarily brave simply
by turning up for the class. Another tutor feels that
it is the confidence that needs stressing. "For
some, it takes a lot of courage to start a skill after
years of doing nothing. At first, a lot of my students
are tentative and unconfident, but as the weeks progress,
I can always see an incredible shift in aptitude and
attitude. As a tutor, one needs to be patient, understanding,
empathetic, incredibly encouraging and enthusiastic."
It's
also easy to stereotype the unconfident learner as someone
who did poorly at school. Art, at my academically-focussed
school, was 40 minutes a week spent enjoying our freedom
in the unstructured environment of a 'non-academic'
subject. Whenever I go to an art class, it takes me
a huge amount of courage, because I always know I'm
going to be the worst. I'd quite happily learn a new
language or study some period of history without fear
of being the class dunce, but in art… I am also
not alone in suffering from the curse of the busy person
that, whilst fully aware that I need to practise at
home, other commitments mean that I can rarely attend
any course two weeks in a row. It's all very well some
tutor telling us that they spent 19 years at the Slade
before being allowed even to show their telephone pad
doodles to anyone else, but tutors also have to be realistic.
The time we get in class may well be the only time we
get to paint or draw.
We
students are a bizarre mixture of under-confidence and
bravura, prior experience of learning (both good and
bad), tics, hang-ups, prejudices, needs, demands, wants
and frailties all bundled together in bone, muscle,
sinew and fat. All a good art tutor needs to be then
is a patient and tolerant friend, counsellor, teacher,
group manager, leader, guide, guru and to know where
the kettle is. It's not asking much, is it?"
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