Andrew Putter has spent a decade teaching design and art.
How did you get into teaching?
I hated school – being treated like a clone, being force-fed ‘knowledge”. I wanted to help change that, and provide some children with the affirmation and space that they need to grow. Our art teacher in high school was a weird, passionate woman called Carol Symonds. She worked as a teacher and as an artist. Carol showed that art is a gateway to getting what you want, and that teaching art is a way of surrounding yourself with a growing community of people who are excited about learning how to get what they want, together.
The highlights of your teaching experience?
It was an extremely heterogeneous school community in 1993. One kid came to school in her own Maserati, another kid’s mom did sex work to pay the rent. There were Chinese, Sotho, Afrikaans, Polish and Arabic first-language speakers – to mention just some of the differences. The kids were very sparky and street smart.
Your challenges in teaching?
Resisting the overwhelming pressure to become a dreary adult who cynically dismisses children’s dreams and tries to impart ‘knowledge” that has nothing to do with my or their lives.
How do you overcome them?
By instigating collaborative projects in my spare time that bring me into productive contact with a range of people in a wide variety of disciplines. That way I’m always changing and developing, staying eccentric to myself.
What’s your approach to discipline?
When you truly treat others as unique and worthwhile, they tend to do the same back. When you act as if you have power over kids by virtue of your rank (as an adult, as a representative of the institution and so on), then you cannot expect them to treat you with respect. I want my kids to be able to tell me when I’ve hurt them, or when they’re cross with me, or when they’re unhappy. It’s hard not to snap back at them when they criticise me, but it really helps not to.
Any embarrassing incidents?
You’re always making an ass of yourself as a teacher. You have to if you expect the kids to be relaxed about the constant failure necessary for growth. They catch you out when you mess up or contradict yourself, and it pays to have the good grace to blush.
Your thoughts on school management?
Generally, my art-teacher partner Kevin and I are given an enormous amount of support, mostly in the form of being left alone to do things our way (which rarely fits into any model of how things should be done). If you want a healthy staff, give them space, and listen to them. Even if you don’t agree with them and with what they feel, you ignore their emotional life at the institution’s peril.
What do you think about the youth of today, their peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses?
Children have a relationship to the world that can only inspire adults if we learn how to value it. Kids can cross-reference and multitask in a way that my generation rarely learnt how to do. Kids can combine generalism with specialisation more easily. My generation only specialises, which makes us inflexible and fearful.
How have you coped with the changes in our education system?
The critical cross-field outcomes (or whatever they’re called now) are wonderfully affirming. But some aspects of OBE are useless for teaching art and design, both of which progress through an increase of diversity and ad hoc, unforeseeable approaches to production. Planning in the conventional sense of working it all out in advance is anathema to the arts. Outcomes are thus only – paradoxically – apparent at the end of making art or design, even though it is useful to have provisional outcomes at the start.
What advice and survival tips do you have for aspiring or young teachers?
Dress strangely.
Imagine that all your students are brilliant.
Encourage kids to learn about what interests them – even (especially!) if you don’t know anything about it.