Webster Art

The quarter is almost over. This is the last day. Only two of my students are here, but the room is full. The Pharmacy program shares our building, and sometimes uses our lab for taking tests. They are all here, in their green scrubs, taking an online test in Angel. My students are either done with their final projects, in which case they don’t need to be here on this last day, or they are coming in later.

The Pharmacy students are different than our students. They seem so much more serious, but that is probably because they are going to be handling medicine, which is far different than pixels. We get the creative types, and we like it that way.

Both my kids got into medicine, and I watched them study. They worked super hard to get into their field. And now they have good jobs, but I don’t know how much fun they are having, or, I should say, artistic fun. Media is a better fit for someone who is creative, I think. As compared to the medical field, I mean. I could be wrong though. Maybe coming up with medical treatments is very creative.

But it can’t be creative in an artistic expression kind of way, like media can. James S. drew this figure in my Illustrator 1 class. He got a lot of satisfaction out of that drawing. And it is a skill that has some value in the marketplace. Not everyone can draw like that, no matter how long they practice. It requires a bit of a gift to see light as well as James saw it. The ability to see light and shadow is the cornerstone of visual art.

One of my students (James S.) drew this in Illustrator

I need to buckle down on my grading but for some reason I’m avoiding it. Grading is like a snowball rolling down hill. The longer I avoid it the more time it has to snowball up on me.

I also need to update my curriculum for next quarter. I’m going to drop pop up windows in favor of an animated jQuery slideshow. Pop up windows are old school, very confusing for the students, and more trouble than they are worth.

Both pop-up windows and the jQuery slide show use pre-built JavaScript, but jQuery uses less of it, so I think the students will find it easier to process.

I’m looking forward to vacation. I’m going to do some climbing and some painting. I enjoy this teaching job, and helping the students who want to learn is awesome work, but it’s nice to have these breaks between quarters.

If and when I ever retire from teaching, my backup plan is to be a full-time landscape painter. It may just be a pipe dream…but I’ve always been a dreamer.