It's a fairly simple and agreeable concept that education is always different, supported by the existence of countless variables; most importantly the teacher and the subject at hand. To more easily compare and contrast one the other would need to be controlled, and given that I plan on comparing two teachers I've had I've decided to pick teachers of a single subject. Art is the best suited because the demands are just vague enough to let the possibilities for achieving them be limitless. Educators have as much freedom as they may or may not choose to allow, and the students' results reflect that. I've heard it said that "the only way to do art wrong is not to do art", and that's exactly the approach that will be taken comparing and contrasting the methods and results of two art teachers I've had.
In eighth grade everyone had to take an art class taught be what might have been the only art teacher at the middle school. Her teaching methods were very straightforward, and her approach to individual topics was very textbook style. Every week we would turn in 5 sketches, intended to be done as homework for each night of school. During classes we would work on a project which would span two or three weeks. Each project was done class-wide and focused on something specific. Not only would it be in one media, but would have a specific theme or set of requirements. For example, portraits with paint, landscapes in charcoal or masks with clay. They're all classic middle school type art projects, and they were always graded by how well they met the certain requirements as well as the appreciation of the teacher. I remember a lot of people disliked the strict requirements of each of the projects, and I remember being upset that the teacher's personal judgment was the major contributor to the awarded grade. Once I was making a portrait with colored spots like Chuck Close and I remember being told to make it "less Homer Simpsony"The teacher herself was strict and harsh with grading and had a constant no-nonsense attitude, making her relatively disliked among the students.
So far the outlook is bleak, but does that make her an especially bad teacher? While at the time I would probably have thought so, along with a majority of the other students she taught, but there was a surprising amount of really good work that came out of that class. The style of focusing on such specifics is a method used successfully in a lot of higher level art classes as well and is especially good at teaching the technical skills required to do certain types of art, while restricting the freedom to do so. At that point you'd need to define art, and whether or not your definition is the purpose of the class before you could definitively say whether or not she's a good teacher.
Two years later, in tenth grade, I found myself in another art class, and I was shocked at how incredibly different it was from art classes I'd had in the past, specifically the one in eighth grade. It was essentially a free for all, where each month a theme was introduced to be met in our projects should we choose, and if we did choose to follow the theme it had no additional grading requirements and was instead a talking point. At the end of each month we would present our work, and with no set grading standard it was essentially a matter of presenting your intent, progress, any change of intent and the final result. The upside is the limitless bounds of what to do for each project, and the grading method was a filter for effort and originality. Everyone loved or at least tolerated the class, and while the teacher had little to do by means of prescribed instruction she was always available, and often busy, helping people to work with the media they chose. It did come with its downsides, though, including the teacher essentially being forced by her model to give good grades to clearly inferior work. When a student meets the expectations to produce original work or put forward a lot of effort they will score well when what they've created is, frankly, bad. Similarly if a student uses the same media over and over again they'll begin to pigeon-hole their own work because it's all they've become good at. The lack of guidance as an effort for original content also leads students to spend more time thinking about what they'll do instead of actually doing work. The result is a mix of fantastic, horrible, unique and repetitive work. For those that manage to best take advantage of this teaching style they have managed to create amazing portfolios and learning a lot about art, while others stagnate and make no progress while receiving just as good grades.
Both were basic classes, without any special intent other than general art, and they were different from each other in so many ways. While the middle school teacher was strict and formulaic the tenth grade teacher had no strict plan and allowed plenty of freedom. Most of the middle school students disliked the art class and teacher while most of the tenth grade students loved theirs. The middle school class had high quality output while the tenth grade class was mixed. There is no clear way to decide which is the better teacher without, again, outlining the intent. Instead this shows that teaching styles each have their own benefits and disadvantages, something that could have been expected from the start. Other conclusions may include that teachers do not have to be liked to be good. The idea of "knowing what's best" for someone comes to mind, while we've been otherwise lead to believe that good teachers are admired by their students. Another may be that while freedom in education for the sake of creativity and individuality is good and can lead to lack of structure, poor rewards systems and unequal learning.
Before I began writing I thought I would have a bias towards the teacher of the tenth grade class, especially considering her openness to talk about ideas and art, making her generally friendlier in addition to having a more enjoyable class, but upon revisiting the details for this comparison I became aware of the downsides. Ultimately the thesis that there is no way to do art wrong can be confirmed, depending on the chosen definition of art. Given that art was chosen as a subject to to study education methods of a whole it can be projected that there is no way to educate incorrectly either, but again depending on the chosen definition of education. With such an approach the public education system can be considered very successful, but given the criticisms a more important matter is to question the chosen definition of education and its real world intent.
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Because I did not remember the name of the middle school teacher (she doesn't work there anymore either) I decided it would be best to leave neither of the two named for the sake of not personifying one more than the other. Try not to let that affect how you think of think of the way they're presented, because I think I did a good job of explaining their personalities and interactions with students.
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