Roughish Draft

Education is always different. This is a pretty simple concept that's supported by the existence of countless factors on learning, including the methods of the teachers, the learning style of the students and the subject being taught. Many subjects have very specific sets of requirements to be learned, like math, which is very formulaic in its demands and as a result is normally formulaic in its teaching. While some alternate methods may occasionally be used, at the end of the day, everyone has learned the same thing in essentially the same way. This may sound ideal from the point of view of an educator, and it's certainly ideal as far as learning math goes, but not the best to study for understanding the nature of education. Arts are the best suited to be studied for understanding the fundamentals of education, 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. 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 now 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 bust, 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. However, like the first, the intent of the class must be brought into question before deciding the success of the teacher, since all students created art and all of them enjoyed it.