Impact in the Art Room

Written by TJ Larsen

December 16, 1998

            When I prepared for Triton Regional High School, my eighth-grade teachers recommended suitable classes for my freshman year.  Which included nearly all high honor classes.  However, the final decision was my parents’ and mine.  It was important to me to take an art class as well, so my father tried to fit the only freshman art class into my schedule.  My academic classes interfered with every attempt.  My parents and I asked for a compromise and eventually I got my art class scheduled into the curriculum.  The solution involved dropping Western Society, a ninth grade history class, and spending that period in the art department.  This special circumstance was allowed because Triton’s faculty already recognized my art abilities.

 

Triton High School’s art room was the largest classroom in the building.  It was also the messiest.  The walls were covered with students’ art in several mediums. The counters’ surfaces were cluttered with newspapers, magazines, and old art supplies.  The cupboards were jam-packed with what looked like even older art supplies.  One corner of the room had a sink full of photograph developing equipment.  All the long, wooden tables in the middle of the room were marked with years of paint, pen, and scratch marks.  There were large drawers and closets in the back of the room stuffed with students’ portfolios and three-dimensional projects.  The worst part was one large pyramid-like stack in the middle of the teacher’s desk.  The bookshelf that looked like a tornado had hit it.

 

The appearance of the Triton’s art room was shocking to me at first. I became used to it quickly.  After the ninth grade, I took art classes every year with the same teacher in the same room.  As a sophomore, I encountered a similar scheduling problem.  Once again, all my advanced classes conflicted with the sophomore art class.  This time I could not drop my history class.  The Academic Questions Magazine carried a report on high schools’ structure and requirements.  It indicated that “the percentage of the credits needed to graduate as a function of credits to be taken in history… fell from an average of 5.8 percent in 1964 to 3.4 percent in 1993” (Dissolution 1).  Triton required me to complete three courses in history to graduate high school.  So I signed up for Honors American History and the photography class, which was the only art class available to me.  Photography was scheduled for juniors and seniors, but I was allowed to attend because the art teacher recognized my talent and desire to be involved with art.

 

I became more aware of problems with Triton’s art department and curriculum scheduling when I joined the photography class and learned I was not the only person with class conflicts.  Often, my art teacher was actually teaching two different classes at the same time.  She would give instructions to photography students on one side of the room and lecture to students taking Graphic Design on the other side. The teacher seemed to always be preoccupied with a deadline or overwhelmed with another class.  The talented students, like myself, were given less attention than the struggling or reluctant students were.  Anybody could show up late for class or leave a little early, and most of the time, would be not even be noticed.  Chatting, homework, and last minute studying commonly took place in several art courses during my four years in high school.  I soon began to realize that my artistic interests were more by my own motivation than by the class projects assigned to me. I never realized how poor my high school art department was until I started taking Drawing and Composition at Endicott College.

 

My primary interest for college has always been art.  My first semester at Endicott did not work out well, but I did experience a more disciplined art environment in my Drawing and Composition class.  The course was held in a room specifically used for drawing and painting.  There were art stools scattered around and a fairly large pile of random objects with interesting curves, textures, and dimensions.  There was not that much more in the room besides that.  I showed up on time for class carrying my portfolio and leather bag filled with art supplies.  I did not have a choice.  The teacher was very strict about attendance, tardiness, and participation. 

 

My college art teacher provided a different classroom experience than my high school art teacher.  He focused on our projects.  There were no distractions in the room to take attention away from the subject.  He would have us draw the same image over and over again, each time in a different way or using mediums that I had never used before.  I was not used to being treated like every other student.  In high school I was known as a good drawer, but in college I was just another student who was learning as I went.  My classmates were all strangers to me and to each other at first.  There were many people at Endicott that obviously did not want to be there, but the majority of students in my Drawing and Composition class really wanted to learn.  “…Many kids who have hated school ever since they were kindergartners continue on to college because their parents push them to go” (Topolnicki 1). When I looked around the room, I never saw other classes’ homework being done.  I noticed that the slackers dropped out of class early in the semester.  As the semester continued, the work only got harder.  In the end I learned more about drawing in that one semester than I did in half my years in high school.

 

             I recognize that my high school art teacher was probably over-worked and given a very difficult schedule to fulfill.  Triton gave me the opportunity to create and present my art, but college has made me realize that art is a subject that you have to work on just as hard as any other academic class.  I have always had a desire to draw and the imagination to create images.  My art grades in high school never represented my true ability because I was never forced to expand my possibilities.  “Within both perception and reality, a teacher’s grading does matter because it influences the brief time teachers have with students, which can influence the students forever” (Maloof M13).  In high school my talent was appreciated and awarded, but in college my talent was challenged and expanded.  Now I know that I actually learn more when the courses I take are harder and force me to become determined to succeed.  If I can sneak in and out of the art room without being noticed how will I ever expect to make an impact?

Work Cited

Maloof, David. “’A’ is For ‘All Right,’ ‘B’ is For’(not) bad,”. The Boston Sunday Globe 6 Dec. 1998: M13.

National Association of Scholars. “The Dissolution Of General Education: 1914-1993.” Academic Questions Fall 1996: 1-2.

Topolnicki, Denise M. “Top 10: What Makes Them Great.” Money Sept. 1997: 1-3.