SFPC: Day 50 - Taeyoon's Class, Exhaustion

We had Taeyoon’s class today. The lecture was “Learning to Teach”.

Taeyoon's Class: Learning to Teach

Group Exercises

For the first half of class, we performed the homework. That is, last week our assignment was to create a five-minute movement-based group exercise.

This is what some of that looked like.

A group exercise classmate Katrina created

10-second video of the class being a human synthesizer.

Lecture One: Learning to Teach

Here are the notes from Taeyoon’s class.

As someone interested in education and teaching, I enjoyed the class very much.

Taeyoon shared some of his ideas about teaching, such as:

• Teaching is first an act of generosity.
• Teaching is sharing your experience, knowledge, and - most importantly - your curiosity.
• It’s about reciprocity. Good teachers ask a lot of their students.
• “I learned the most from teachers that challenged me.”
• “I teach in order to learn.”
• “I come to class to share my enthusiasm, and to learn from you.”
• “I like to think of teaching as ‘structured improvisation’ “
• Youtube lectures are boring because there is no possibility for deviation.
• The importance of controlled failure. A safe environment for students to fail.

We talked about Black Mountain College, which Taeyoon described as “The American liberalism of John Dewey meets Bauhaus modes of production.”

Apparently, Black Mountain College was the first place women studied alongside men, PoC along white people. Homosexuality was accepted there. A safe place for students, which was rare in that time.

We also talked about the Black Mountain College Prospectus, written in 1952.

• Selected faculty who are practitioners.
• “A good teacher is always more a learner than a teacher.”
  • “…a great capacity for dejection.”

As well as Anni Albers, a textile designer and teacher at BMC.

• She was, “a prototype of the modern designer.”
• Her work was “very computational”. Her work showed “the need to bring code into the world of design.”

We also talked about how artists create their own model to explain the world(“The world is full of experiences and sensations…”).

We talked about Pauline Oliveros: “If you want to become an artist, the world is a candy to you.” Oliveros championed the concept of “Deep Listening”.

We also discussed the principles of constructivist learning.

On the Greatest Teachers

• “Patience, to listen closely to another person, takes courage. Compassion takes determination.”
• “Enter the stage as one person, leave as another.”
• Using everything you have to teach, to create transformative teaching experiences.
• “My greatest teachers were my lovers. Only between the intimacy of lovers, we transcend the dichotomy of teaching and learning.”

Lastly, at the end of class, we designed a four-class curriculum for six students. Mine was called, “Taking (Back) Your Time: Time Strategies in a Late Capital World”.

Hudson Pier Walk: Late Afternoon

Final Project

Katrina and I met up in the kitchen here and talked about ideas for a final project. We settled on a simple concept: taking found objects and affixing memes to them, possibly even creating a large pile of memes-found-object-trash.

Why?

Memes are disposable. They’re also largely virtual. There’s something appealing about reappropriating these virtual internet artifacts and making them physical, in a controlled and deliberate way.

We also wanted to decontextualize memes prevalent during the presidential election. Pepe the frog and memes as a refractive cultural lens. For instance, all of the presidential candidates have at least one or two Pepe memes of them. Katrina and I want to create objects that present this phenomenon. We want the objects we create to dialog with each other.

We’ll probably work mostly with cardboard, paper, Modge-Podge.

I’ll post photos as we work on this project.

For Lunch:

Thanksgiving leftovers: turkey, macaroni and cheese, bread pudding.

For Dinner:

Brown rice, avocado, sesame oil, salt and pepper.