Hi there! I know, it’s been a little while. See, there was this thing that happened, and then another thing, and another, and well, here we are.
Some of you know that besides being a working artist, I am also a teacher. Since 2009, I have been an adjunct professor in the Photography Department at Sierra College in Rocklin, California. I primarily teach a beginning class, with more than half of the class taught in an actual darkroom. Sometimes I also get to teach an intermediate class which is only film and darkroom work, which I truly love.
In March of 2020, we were about halfway through the semester and I was teaching both classes, fully in the darkroom. And then we went to distance learning. Challenging is a bit of an understatement, but we all fumbled our way through the rest of that semester, switching to digital work, which is not the same.
Summer of 2020 I spent, along with so many of my colleagues, learning how to properly teach online, including figuring out how to teach the elementary class – which must include a darkroom element to meet student learning outcomes. Thankfully I work with an awesome group of photographers and we all came together as a team and created an online unit that instructs students on how to build a pinhole camera, a minimal home darkroom and alternate process chemistry called Caffenol to meet that darkroom requirement for the course.
Fall of 2020 was my first semester of properly teaching online, which includes building a class in our school’s learning management system. Imagine taking sixteen weeks worth of instruction, typing parts of lectures in a readable format, curating videos and creating demo videos as well. I was creating the class, week by week, working a bit ahead of my students, while interacting with them as well. At one point in the semester, I was about three weeks ahead of my students, which was great.
And then we lost my mother-in-law. My three week lead vanished and the rest of the semester I felt good to finish by Friday what my students would need on Monday. We had other struggles in our home and needless to say, there was no time for art making for several months.
But after that semester, I had a six week break and from that point on, my course would only need updates and tweaks and I could teach two classes and breathe again. I even started making art again and had an exhibit at Sparrow Gallery in April 2021.
Next week I’ll be making a trip to Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale that was originally planned for April 2020, and I am so looking forward to it.
Thanks for sticking with me, I think things are going to get better again.