It’s the weekend before Memorial Day, it’s my daughter’s last day of elementary school, my grades are in and graduation has come and gone. 16 weeks of teaching people how to make photographs in a darkroom, how to use 2D visual fundamental principles in their work, and how to write when you actually have something worth saying. Like every semester teaching at my university there are successes and faith-in-ourselves-and-humanity restored moments, and like every semester there are failures of imagination, accountability and the system moments. Like anyone human, I fixate on the latter.
LESSON #1
A student that deserved to fail. That missed far more than the allowable number of classes. That did less than half the reading. That turned in everything late, sometimes by months. That acted in bad faith the entirety of the course. That could be civil to my face but was incredibly hostile behind my back. That wrote feedback in course evals as if they were sending back all seven courses of a meal and wanted to speak with the manager.
That provoked a disproportionate response in me that I have been trying to examine for the past couple of weeks.
There’s a piece by artist Mike Monteiro that I’ve joked about getting framed for my office. I’m not joking anymore, I just bought it and it’s entirely true:
I tell my students that in my classes grades are usually A’s and F’s with little in between. All grading is fully transparent: do the things, do them with integrity and not half-assery, turn them in, you get an A. Don’t show up, don’t do the things, and treat my classes like a PSA you can opt out of, then you’ll probably fail. I operate under a labor-based grading scale, and teaching during Covid has dialed down my hard-ass tendencies 95%.
Accommodations are an exponentially exploding entity that anyone involved in education has become very aware of, especially since 2020. A good 15% of students in my classes have accommodation letters asking for things that I can understand, like extra time for papers and testing, distraction-free environments, copies of lecture notes, and then other requests feel like they are testing the limits of what the system can bear: flexible attendance policies, not being called in on class or asked to participate in anything group related—I haven’t had emotional support animals yet, but note that the population of labrodoodles on campus and in classrooms has increased precipitously in the last several years.
To be clear: the student in question did not have active accommodations. I accommodate when asked to directly and indirectly. In this case, it was the latter.
My sense as an educator is that you have to decide whether you’re going to die and die again on each and every hill, or whether you are just going to tolerate trespasses for the betterment of the vast majority that act in good faith, and believe that karma will eventually catch up with those who believe they’re gaming the system.
But sometimes not dying on a hill means dying a little on the inside instead.
The student didn’t fail. They rallied at the eleventh hour to turn in enough work to squeak by with a passing grade. By my own labor-based grading standards, they did enough in the end to merit getting through the course. But maybe my standards need adjusting because I am left feeling like they came into the class with preconceptions, left without having challenged or changed any of those, and learnt nothing from me but still passed. How can I better adjust my grading criteria so that this is not an outcome that leaves me feeling existential dread for my profession?
I worked out with my therapist (no, really) that what really bothered me in this situation was that this person oriented themselves towards me in a completely upside-down way: in their mind, everything I did, said, assigned, discussed and evaluated was being done for the exact opposite reasons and to the exact opposite effects of what was intended. And owing to that upside-downness, they were going to read into every interaction and assignment the worst possible reading of me as a person. My class was not only an inconvenience to them, but an affront. I know this because of feedback that was left in two different places about my course.
One answer (a frustrating one) is for me to just get comfortable with ambivalence. For a long while, I understood ambivalence to mean a kind of flatness, a “meh” response to something. Its actual meaning is more about being of two minds on something, or rather, to hold to conflicting feelings about something at the same time.
I love teaching.
I hate teaching.
I love my students.
I hate my students.
Teaching fills me.
Teaching empties me out.
LESSON #2
The second lesson this semester is about what people who come into your life have to teach you about yourself. Or more precisely: that these people can embody the qualities that you recognize you lack, and wish you could cultivate more to be a better person.
Jenny Irene Miller was a visiting artist-in-residence at my University this past fall. They were Inupiaq, one of the Inuit tribes in Alaska. Their work was about quiet observation, place, visual sovereignty and the communities and people they loved. Jenny had an exhibition of their work that I researched and wrote about, and they also contributed a very generous amount of time to my students in two different classes, including giving thorough individual critiques for 15 students in a photobook making course, which ran an hour and half over the three hour course time. We had dinner a couple of times and took a hike in the red rock canyons here during the short week-long stay of her residency. Jenny came to my home one afternoon and we spent a few hours pouring through rare finds in my photobook collection, which is such a delight for me when someone else enthusiastically engages with them on the same level that I do (making all of that money spent on them feel, for a brief moment, like a reasonable expense).
What I took in about Jenny Irene was how quietly intent they were, asking thoughtful and non-typical questions that did not stand in for small talk, but for intimacy and a desire for insight. There was a gentleness that hung around them like an almost-tangible aura, and because it is so different from the way I present and operate in the world, this quality stood out to me as if it were from another dimension.
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to research, interview and write about several indigenous artists, and there is so much of value to be learned in the way that all of them engage with and integrate their community and their community’s values into their work. There is humor, there is deep acknowledgement of history, there is a penetrating and respectful looking into instead of looking at. One of my favorite pieces that Jenny showed to my students was a portrait of a young woman, that they introduced to my students as “a portrait of my great grandmother.” The woman pictured looked younger than Jenny, and my students looked up confused. “In Inupiaq culture when someone dies and a birth happens close to the death of that person, the baby will take on the name of the person that passed, so in this way, Aklaasiaq is my great-grandmother.” I remember thinking how beautiful that tradition is, especially as someone coming from a culture where stories are not passed down, histories are not acknowledged or told, and respect is a directive not an invitation. I remember thinking that I wish I had some semblance of community with my family that Jenny Irene had with theirs.
Jenny Irene Miller returned to Nome, Alaska. Their career was ascending, and they had told me about a panel discussion they were partaking in with just Inuit artists on the east coast. They were going to have a surgery in the winter that would put them out of commission for weeks. They contacted me in the spring to let me know that they were going to be an artist in residence at the Denver Art Museum this summer, and that they would love to reconnect. That re-connection was one of the principle things I was looking forward to this summer.
Late into the semester, at the end of an evening of teaching, I checked my email one last time before packing everything up to go home. Terrible news, it read. Jenny Irene Miller had passed away in an accident. They would not be making any more work. They would not be coming to Denver. I would not be seeing them ever again. Jenny’s death would impact far more than just myself, someone they met in the course of their professional career for one week. Their passing would affect their wife, their family, their community, so many many people that had much more relationship and history with them than me. Their death would throw me though, for some nearly unnameable reason. For a while I did not know what it was or why the loss felt so acute.
That gentleness. That I don’t have, that they did. I would not get to learn about it by proxy or osmosis again. I’ll have to learn about that which I want to take into myself by some other means. Some other means I can’t fathom right now.
