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The purpose of this webpage is two-fold. First, I want to show my friends and family…and indeed whoever else is interested… what I’ve been up to since hanging up my university professor’s hat. The other purpose is to explore my my passion for teaching.
Since leaving the Groves of Academe, I’ve been making art, learning scores of techniques and procedures, attending classes and workshops, trying my hand at everything from pottery to metal crafting. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with the things I’ve learned.
But once I’ve mastered a skill….sometimes before I’ve mastered it completely…I feel a need to turn around and teach that skill to someone else. That’s how I learn best. It’s how I integrate new ideas into what I already know. It’s how I make new skills my own.
From years of experience inside and outside the classroom I recognize that different people have different learning styles (some of us have to read and ponder, some have to watch and listen, some have to get their hands physically into the mix). Because of that, I understand that I have to adapt my teaching strategies to the learning style of the person being taught. This often forces me to understand processes in ways I may not have thought about before. To put this another way: I feel that I don’t wholly understand something until I considered it from a number of different perspectives.
I learned more about yoga when I started teaching yoga than I ever learned in yoga classes. I learned more about drawing in trying to convey to someone else how to draw than I learned in workshops. After trying to explain to undergraduates (400 in a class!) how anthropology changed my outlook on life, my passion for the subject deepened.
So that’s why the webpage: it’s about art as expression and teaching as art. It’s about how I’ve explored integration and wholeness and richness and creativity, satisfaction and delight and joy.