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When asked what I do for a living, I'm apt to respond that I attempt to make silk purses out of sows ears. Lately, I have been succeeding. I teach Visual Art to inner-city teenagers at a trade school in the city of Cleveland. This is a school for the adcademically disinclined, that has been struggling to overcome it's reputation as 'Last Chance High". I was initially hired to teach Sign Painting back in 1998 to a student body comprised of mostly boys studying welding, construction, auto tech, machining, and diesel. I convinced my principal that sign painting was obsolete in this age of technology and asked him to let me teach art. I was amazed with the facility, the shops, the equipment, and the technical abilities of my students. This was a sculptors paradise. Too bad, I was a painter. To remedy my lack of 3D expertise, I sought local sculptors for residencies, and began writing for grants to be able to pay them. I began establishing relationships with the various arts institutions in the city as well as individual artists and independant galleries. I became interested in creating public art with my students and recieved major funding to accomplish that goal. We are now involved in several public art projects with nationally and internationally renouned artists. We keep looking for new ways to continue our collaborations with the community, develop new talent, and change a few lives. I also enjoy writing. My chosen career has provided me with many stories. I have been writing a column for a local quarterly arts magazine, mostly autobiographical/personal musings. I am going to include my latest essay on this page. It explains a lot about who I am, and what I do all day. Read on......please. Clevetian Glass/ Feb 2004 MB Matthews Chairman, Fine Arts Dept Max S. Hayes Vocational High School Essay: Artist Envy The prolonged mental growl that began during my caffeineless commute along the shoreway to the West Side was becoming audible. This morning I had little tolerance for dawdlers and draggers. The stairwells were clogged with teenagers in no obvious hurry to get to a first period class. I glared at the group of boys slowly shuffling in front of me. The crotches of their jeans drooping to knee-level like a toddler carrying a loaded diaper. Fashion was impeding my progress. Finally reaching the third floor, I turned the corner, and was nearly bowled over by three boys racing after each other down the wide hallway. "Hey watch it mother f---er, you almost hit Ms. Matt!" "Thanks Robert," I responded, "but could you please try to leave the mothers out of it?" "Oh, my bad." "No problem. Be careful." God, I love this job. When people meet me for the first time, and I tell them that I teach high school in the city of Cleveland, quite often, their response is what I have come to call ‘Shock or Awe’. “Oh my!” they gasp, stepping back, with eyebrows raised. I am then looked upon as either crazy, and regarded with caution; or else treated with reverence like some kind of a saint. I have to admit that many of us who choose to teach in the urban schools do so with some degree of altruism. However, I am certain, my students would insist that ‘crazy’ is the more apt description. I might agree. Assuredly, there are days when I wonder if I made the best career choice when, as a very young woman, I stood at that particular crossroad. I went to college on an art scholarship, and was a painting major. My mother, fearing that she would never experience the empty-nest syndrome if I had to support myself as an artist, urged me to take an education class. I soon discovered that I liked working with kids, and went on to earn my teaching certificate. I've been teaching art now for more than twenty years. Teaching visual art to kids is vastly different from being a visual artist. I have found that it is useful to have the eye/hand coordination that is essential to developing drawing skills. But more often, I rely on far different talents. I use my nagging skills, (honed to perfection during my 24 years as the parent of three children) 'motivating' 160 reluctant adolescents to produce artwork. I count on my slightly warped comedic tendencies to find the humor that helps everyone make it through another day. The college course I took in ‘Persuasive Argument’ proved very useful the morning I asked a boy to hand me the gun that was poking out of his jeans pocket. My ability to listen has proved invaluable, as over the years, my students have shared their stories of tragedy, abuse, violence, and neglect. Persistence and dogged determination enabled me to help these same kids navigate their way through the mazes and stumbling blocks of countless social service agencies. My cat-like reflexes served me well when I was quickly able to extinguish a pile of newspapers, set ablaze in my classroom by a mentally ill child. And one afternoon, I shared my tears and my grief, with the mother of a boy who I watched dying in a school parking lot, two weeks earlier. That day, I discovered her wandering alone in the school hallway. She had come to see the place where her child had taken his own life. My career choice has proved to be quite challenging, and occasionally I find myself wondering what my life might have been like had I chosen that other road, and become a painter. The ‘what-ifs’, once whispered in my barely conscious thoughts, have lately upped their volume. In fact, on several occasions, they have even been uttered aloud. I’ve been feeling twinges of career-envy when my friends, who are now successful artists, talk about their projects, their commissions, their travels, their gallery openings, their bodies of work, and their legacies. Bodies of work? All I have to show are piles of demos. Countless pages of geometric forms, value scales, boxes in one point perspective, boxes in two-point perspective, proportions of the face, proportions of the body, how-to-draw hands, feet, buildings, trees, blah, blah, blah. I gaze out at the gray street through the cracked windows of my classroom; the dirty glass pocked with bullet holes, and wonder aloud, "What if I wasn't a teacher? What if I just quit teaching and started making art full-time?" A voice interrupts my reverie. "If it wasn't for your class, I wouldn’t be here. I would have quit school." Another voice chimes in, "Me too. This class is the only reason I come to school every day." "Really?" I ask. "Yeah, I hate school.” “I hate it too. Don't quit." "Okay,” I smile, “I won't quit...You know, I must be crazy." "Oh yeah,” they laugh, ”You're crazy all right." I guess I will have a legacy. I have been keeping a weblog based upon my day to day experiences and thoughts as a teacher in the Cleveland Public Schools. If you care to read more about my education as an urban educator click on my blog site: MB Matthews: Street Smarts http://mbmatthews.blogspot.com/ Please sign my guestbook. Sign in to be able to view mbmatt's guestbook and friends list!
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