A Great Night

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Photo Nov 23, 9 40 01 AMEvery night I get to teach is a great night. It doesn’t matter if it is a sculpting or painting party, a computer class, an art lesson for one person or many, a lecture or presentation, I love to teach. It feels good to empower people, to help them try new things and have fun with it. I like to challenge people to break with the fear of trying and to accept their efforts as accomplishments. Interestingly, it was not always that way. Yes, I liked the spotlight since very little and performing was a lot of fun, but teaching was something I didn’t like. It is not the same as just being in front of people, perform, and leave. Teaching requires commitment and responsibility.

When I was working on my masters in education I began looking at instructional technology as a way to teach indirectly. How does that work? Well, I wanted to design online learning environments and allow people to interact with the computer instead of me. To my surprise, the masters took me to new and very interesting teaching experiences. I was teaching art to children with disabilities, computer skills and applications to working adults and seniors, then special education. From there I began training people in different areas during the years I was pursuing a PhD in education. In December 2012, once I achieved the PhD, I applied to many universities to teach either online or on campus. It seems almost impossible to get a faculty job in a university if you don’t have experience. Of course, you are not going to get experience if no one hires you. Then you get the ‘non-qualified’, ‘over qualified’ (not sure what that means), or the ‘we decided to go with another candidate’ thing.

Last week I received notification that I’ve been accepted as part-time faculty in a university, and not an art class. My PhD is in education and for the first time I will be able to use it in the specialty I worked so hard for. I am not going to reveal the name or location until I take a selfie on campus. Although my Facebook friends already know. Teaching just got more serious. I will continue teaching art and the sculpting and painting parties, the workshops, the seminars, and the private art lessons, but teaching 3 times per week in a continuous seminar for a semester is going to be fantastic. I can’t wait to begin. I can’t wait to see the dream of being a college professor come to pass.

That is Encouraging

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ReverieYesterday I wrote for the first in ten days. During the time I was absent from writing it surprised me how many people was still coming to the website to read previous posts. More encouraging is receiving messages and comments regarding yesterday’s post. All comments and messages were about how the post was a timely reminder for the right moment. That is encouraging indeed. It is a special kind of feeling difficult to articulate but I am definitely thankful for it. It is good to think that what I write here is an unrewarded effort although it feels that I am writing to no one sometimes. It is good to know someone still reads this and benefits from it.

Photo Nov 22, 10 59 16 PMI do not think I have a special wisdom or some kind of talent to speak to people’s need. I am also far away from being a preacher, a prophet, or a motivational speaker (although I used to be a motivational speaker a long time ago). In my short life and the experiences I’ve been through, as well as the times I learned from what I’ve seen from others, I learned to pause and see the world. I do see the world with a little humor which is not always understood by others but it is fun inside my head. Learning from the Bible as well as having a holistic view of the world helps me connect the dots. That doesn’t mean that I know everything or that I have everything figured out. No one does. I am just glad and thankful that I can share the little I know and bright the day for someone.

Take some time to stop and consider your lives and your experiences. Share them with others. There is always something others can learn from you. Maybe you can bright someone’s day. Even in our failures (which are only failures if we learn nothing from them) we can be changing a life if we share.

Race Against Time

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This weekend is for me a race against time. It is one of those weekends where everything decided to fall together. If you are reading this in the morning EST,  as you read this I’ll be probably loading, or at least trying to load a truck with our stuff because we are moving tomorrow. It is going to be a great workout. If you are reading this a little later in the afternoon, I’ll probably be speaking about Online Media Tips for Artists at The Gallery at Elemar in an event organized by Project Storefronts in New Haven, CT. Right after 5:00pm I’ll be back at loading until who knows what time. If you are reading at night that’s what I’ll probably be doing.

Saturday is the official day of the moving and it just happened to be the same day of my son’s championship game. There will be more loading in the morning followed by the game and then more loading. Hopefully, we can leave before it gets dark so we can start the wonderful task of unloading the truck into the new place. I bet the process will continue through Sunday as well. There is still so much to do and the more I think about it the more tired I become. It is difficult to focus on each of these things. I just hope we get enough help to get it done soon.

I’ll prepare myself to give you a description of the experience at the gallery with the presentation if I get any time to write today. I am also thinking about writing a little about a very curious experience I had this week at an art exhibit and a comment I received in a previous post in relationship to modern art. That I guess is going to be fun. I am not a fan of modern art so before I write about it I have to prepare myself to be objective and unbiased. Also, I want to write about a very pleasant social experience I had this week which is totally unrelated to the aforementioned subject but I believe it is worthy to be shared. For now I’m back to the task at hand.

I Want Something Else

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Bas-Relief Sculptures

Several years ago I began teaching children with disabilities. I entered an uncharted territory and had no idea what to expect. It was an adventure from the start. I learned a lot about human behavior during those years.

“I want something else!”

That was the cry of one of my students. She repeated this words until she was screaming her heart out. Nothing could calm her down. Until her attention was diverted she would continue claiming she wanted something else but she would never say what she wanted. In multiple occasions I took walks with her trying to calm her down. During our walks she asked the same set of questions in the same sequence several times, “What are we doing after that?” She wanted to know what she was doing next after the walk and five or six events after that until the agenda of the day was completed.

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Wind by Ivan Tirado

I don’t think we are so different from her. We often want something else. You heard this before, “The grass is always greener on the other side”. We are always searching for something different from what we have, but we can’t tell what it is. We often want to know details of the future ahead of us. We want to be certain we covered all the bases. We want to make sure we are in control. The truth is we never are. We may claim we are but we are not even knowing what the future holds or knowing what we want, we are not. Honestly, that is a good thing.

Wanting something else provides an opportunity for hope. It allow us to consider the difference between need and want. Not being in control allow us to be thankful of the now. The past teaches us how we got here, how to live today, and to work hard for a better future. We can’t be idle but constantly moving towards our goals with the compass of hope.

Assumptions, Interpretations, and Attributions

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I heard a story many years ago. Two men working for a show company were sent to a tribe in the middle of nowhere to scout the territory and inform the company of any possibility of success selling shoes there. The first man makes his observations and informs the company of his conclusions:

– Business here is going to be a complete waste of time and effort. No one is wearing shoes.

The second man also reports back to the company:

– Business here is going to be great and worth the efforts. No one is wearing shoes.

Similarly this happens in every situation in life. One situation, two individuals, different views. It happens in the art world too. Two individuals can look at the same piece of art and have two completely different views of it. Interestingly, every view is subjective.

Photo Sep 06, 2 31 35 PMWe have the capacity to decode the symbolic information we receive and develop our own views to explain what we see, feel, and understand. We give meaning to the world around us through the filter of our experiences and knowledge. Socially, in the meaning making process we examine multiple views, balance them with our own and form our conclusions. These conclusions are explained and could be categorized in assumptions, interpretations, and attributions.

Assumptions are taking for granted a conclusion without proof or facts based on personal biases. It is very natural to us to fall prey of assumptions. That is not a problem. The problem is when no proof or facts allow us to consider other options. We form our view and that becomes the only truth. Interpretations, on the other hand, consider facts balancing these with experience and knowledge, assigns meaning, but remains open to consider other views that eventually help grow and develop a broader picture. Attributions go a step further.

According to Bernard Weiner’s Attribution Theory, broadly used in cognitive psychology, we assign meaning to meaning. In other words, we explain why we reached our assumption or interpretation of an event, behavior, a piece of art, and other forms of symbolic information. We assign internal or internal causes to our conclusions. Interestingly, we switch between internal and external attributions when it come to us and others. If we are successful or received favorable feedback we apply internal attributes and tell ourselves: “I worked very hard on this”. When we fail or we don’t like the feedback we receive we tell ourselves we apply external attributes to justify the results: “I don’t care what you have to say. You don’t know what I had to go through to achieve this”.

Photo Sep 06, 2 34 39 PMThe scene quickly switches when it comes to judging the behaviors or events involving others. When people act in a specific way we attribute that behavior to internal factors concerning personality or character traits like coping skills (or lack thereof), or attitude issues. Rarely we consider external attributes to be the cause for other’s behaviors like a difficult situation they might be going through.

Once again, these views are subjective. All opinions are subjective. Every perspective is as individual as the person who has it. However, we must be very careful how we share these views with others not only for their sake but for our own. Our words can hurt people. We don’t know what they are going through. We should lift people up instead of trying to tear them apart. We must remember that when we apply assumptions, interpretations, and attributions to others we do so based on our own views, biases, experience, and knowledge. When we talk to others or about others, we might be revealing more about ourselves than what we are trying to reveal about them.

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:2