The Second Lesson I Have Learned As An Art Major

    Everyone in the art building at SDSU can admit some of the classes they have taken are just not their style of art, or even something they are remotely good at. (If you are one of those majors that's just good at everything... we can't be friends anymore lol) However, I have noticed a kind of family that forms with in the walls of the poorly designed art buildings. Everyone is pretty much willing to help their fellow students, even the guys and girls in the Blick store. Which by the way is MUCH appreciated by us kooky students.

    But the lesson isn't so much about people being good people and helping each other out, it is about the professors expecting you to be good at what they are teaching because their subject is the most important ever and every other professor else can go suck it. Crappy way of teaching right? Well, I guess the way I have explained it makes it sound awful and no one should ever go into the art program because all the professors are rotten people and expect the sun and moon to rise and set on their knowledge. Wrong.


    The professors are actually excellent, well... most of them at least. By being pushed to perform at the quality level they expect it has challenged my own artistic ability in ways I didn't think I was able to create something. Take for example my metals professor; harsh critic, ridiculous expectations of workmanship, insane amounts of extra lab hours, and projects that seemed to fly by if you blinked too slow. This was by far one of the most difficult classes I have taken in my artistic career. Though, if it wasn't for him I would have never learned how to properly run my solder lines, have perfectly sanded EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING, nor would I have ever lived up to producing something of a finer quality. Days I would loathe that class for sore and tired hands as well as scarred, bumped, bruised and everything else in between, hiss at the thought of sitting through another grueling and often tortuous critique where very little positivity was mentioned, and the thought of spending yet another weekend/night/hours after class working on the same small, very small, detail until it was up to his standards. But looking back, I realized the way he taught made me hold myself to a higher standard and produce better work.