#SOL16: Painting By Numbers

I.


Last week I went to a painting party--you may know it as sip and paint and although the concept sounds like it should be fun, I found it painstakingly dull.  I did not expect to paint a picture by following exact directions from a young woman who demonstrated what we were to paint as she talked and talked and talked.

Paint a blue rectangle the width of your hand and the height of your palm, like this...Now add a bit of white paint, just a touch to the tip of the papa bear brush and now draw a line, like this...Rinse your brush like this... and so on.

Tonight, painting a 'Tuscan scene' was a lesson in tedium. At the end of the two hours, everyone in the room had more or less painted the same picture, in the same style. Who knew such things happened?

Throughout the night I imagined how Rob would have laughed. I realized on the way home that I often counted on him to translate the suburban experience. The irony here was that Rob was from Brooklyn, but nonetheless had uncanny way of being able to uncover truths rather easily. I imagined a conversation that could have happened as I drove home.

M: I think I might go to a sip and paint art experience.
R: A what?
M: It's a social thing at an art studio. You paint and drink wine.
R: Why would you do that? You go every Friday to an art studio.
M: This is more social.
R: I bet this is a paint by numbers thing.
M. No, Why would it be that?
R: Everyone paints the same scene, in the same manner as everyone else.
M: Why would we all be painting the same thing?
R: Cause the idea is not about expression, but rather about replication.

And then he might have talked to me about Walter Benjamin and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and hours would have passed.  This is what life with Rob was largely about. He so often was able to distill the marrow of an experience. I miss that. It's these kind of evenings that make me miss him even more than usual. On the way home, with my paint by number atrocity in the back seat, I couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for myself. This doing something social, something new was an epic fail.

And in some ways that feels okay.


II.

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2

On the evening of the paint and sip party, I spent three hours at an art studio painting with watercolor as I have done for the last two weeks. It's a challenging medium I have no experience with and today I painted a front stoop and wooden doors of a city brownstone. I sketched the scene and then tried to face the inherent challenges that come with representing such angles. Now add water and well my hands do not work as I would like them. But, I love my stairs. The hours passed in a blink. I enjoyed the loose banter with the others using the studio and appreciated all I am learning. There's such intensity in the work and the artist who leads the session is also a connoisseur of music and so there is interesting background that isn't filled with a lot of talk, save a few demonstrations, and the hours pass swiftly. I was shocked today when I looked at my phone and noticed it was already after 1:00 p.m.



III.

Living with loss means means understanding that it isn't simply a matter of events that I crave. I crave relationships--connecting with others deeply.  Losing Rob has made the familiar less so and the normal mostly absent.

The Complexity of Teacher and Student Relationships

Thinking of Hopper ( M.A. Reilly, 2013).

I.

Tonight a former student of my husband who he taught in an urban NJ middle school contacted him through LinkedIn. The student is now married, living in southern California, and works in the alternative energy business (solar energy). He contacted Rob to thank him for teaching him and to connect with him again after 12 years.  He wanted to talk writing and asked Rob if he ever got around to writing that 9-11 essay that Rob must have mentioned to his class wanting to write.  They have reconnected.

This student would not have been considered a model student by most standards.  He is the student you could have asked "What are you learning today?"--and there's a very good chance he might not have known. One might have described him as a poor kid, who had been deskilled, and yet was quite bright. Rob says he could be handful and that was most days.  As I listen to him talk, I'm reminded of another boy he taught--this one coming from a very affluent home who also was a handful. This young man is now in medical school and contacted Rob, asking him to meet for coffee and some conversation.  

But it's not these stories that I want to write about tonight.  Rather, I want to say something about the complexity of the relationships between students and teachers and how impossible it is to know the trajectory of a teacher's or student's influence.

II.

Two weeks ago Rob and I had dinner with a former student of mine, Mark, and his wife, Karen. I taught Mark 20 years ago at a NJ high school. I was his tenth grade English teacher.  We've kept in touch during the years. He told me at dinner that what he remembered most was that I took him to visit a graduate course I was taking in writing so that he could see poetry in action at the 92nd Street Y.  I can still recall his class and of course him in the class and what he thought about books we read, acting, and the many works we wrote.  At dinner we had several laughs reminiscing about our class and his classmates. In a few weeks he plans to send me the completed draft of a book he is authoring about teaching. It's a critical look based on teachers he has had and his own experiences teaching.  I'm a bit anxious as he told me there's a chapter in it about my teaching as he recalls it.

III.

When I think about Mark, I realize that it is hard to imagine the trajectory of influence we have had on one another across these last two decades as we moved from teacher and student to friends.  Who knows how that trajectory might be shaped in future years.

There is nothing simple about teacher and student relationships.

I think about the plethora of teacher evaluation rubrics that are so very popular now and wonder how Rob or I might have been scored on such an instrument.  As I browse the 120 pages of the Danielson Rubric, I see there's nothing about love and perhaps that for the better.  

I don't know a teacher who's excellent who doesn't love his or her students, first. Last. That's what teaching is mostly about.