Image © Jose & MidJourney
This week something touched me, deeply, but I need to be protective of people I love to talk about it. For this reason, forgive me if at times you are curious about details that I am not willing to disclose. But I could not ignore this, as what hit me most this past week.
My daughter is studying art in a local college, she started with sculpture and then opted for ceramics. This is her first year in ceramics, there has been a lot of process, and she is now in the beginning of her discovery journey as an artist. Like in many art/ design/ architecture schools, she had a review of her first semester work, and I was in the room, as a silent guest.
I am a trained designer, and when I went to design school, we would have these, they were ultimately great but always painful, because they were meant to be as the saying goes. The teachers were doing their job in training us throughout the year, but alone and with the students, when review time came along, the same teachers with a few guests in a room, was a time to show off your chops, your critical skills, but above all your ability to say smart and many times hurtful things to us, as if pushing us off the horse to see if we got back on it. Silently, there was always a competition to see who could slap harder, without making a noise, if you know what I mean. In many cases, a student crying was a sign it was working, and while we all dreaded the design reviews, we knew we couldn’t avoid them, so we prepared as best as we could, knowing we would end up being slapped anyway. Some might defend this as the right way to go about it, the “pressure makes diamonds” approach, the belief that if you want to be great, and distinguish yourself in the immense blob of people out there doing similar things, you have to suffer, be able to reach deep down inside, feel the pain of discovering yourself as an artist/ designer/ architect, what you stand for, what you want to do, and why, why, why.
As a professional design manager, I have done this throughout my life with different teams, but I always opted for a different approach. I have always tried to critically evaluate what is being presented but try and do so by identifying areas where the work could be better, how it could be better without prescribing, suggesting exploration and experimentation, making failure acceptable, using what was there as a starting point for something greater. I just engaged with a designer I managed more than 30 years ago, he is himself a manager now, he said he used to dislike the way I was always apparently unhappy with the results of his work, but was always pushing him to do better, and that he remembers that as being valuable to him. Some will say the role of an educator is different from a professional setting and a manager, agree, but the quest to make everyone in our team as good as they can be is a shared mission.
Being in the room with my daughter as she presented her work was an excruciating experience, three of the teachers were trying to get her to talk about what she did and why, poking and nudging her into disclosing her thoughts beyond the work, while one of the teachers decided to aggressively challenge my daughter on why did she even wanted to be an artist and why was she in art school at all. The design manager in me tried to understand what this person was doing as blunt exercise of throwing my daughter off the horse, probably this teacher’s s typical ‘modus operandi’ or a sort of ‘good cop/ bad cop’ approach to the review. The father in me wanted to get up and bash this teacher verbally in the same cruel and thoughtless way she was doing with my daughter, I wanted to make her understand that she knew nothing about my daughter and that whatever strategy she thought she was using was in fact not going to have the desired effect. At the end, I hugged my daughter and attempted to instill some perspective in all this, I wanted her to understand that this was part of the growth process as an artist, that she would look back as a learning, that it was meant to be personal and well intentioned, even if a particular teacher chose to deliver her review in a painful way.
It took me a while to breath normally, I remember thinking this was as bad as when her mother was giving birth and I was in the room holding her hand, someone I loved was in pain, and I couldn’t do anything to help her, expect being present. And I was going over what this teacher said, not as much how brutally she said it, and I realized her issue was not as much with the work – they all said her later work was very good, different, impactful – but with the inability to extract meaning and purpose from why the work was done the way it was. The whole conversation was about why my daughter did what she did, why she chose to do it the way she did, what was she feeling, thinking, why, why, why.
In the car, I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast, and Stephen Dubner was interviewing Adam Moss, who was once his boss when he was an editor in the New York Magazine. Adam has an impressive CV as an editor, look at his profile and you’ll see what I mean. But a few years ago, he stopped doing this and tried to become a painter, an artist. The journey took many twists and turns and led him to write a book that sounds and feels like a magazine called ‘The Work of Art’. The book is a compendium of conversations with accomplished artists on how they were able to do something out of nothing, “from first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another.” Listening to the podcast, I was reminded how hard this journey is, how creating meaning and being able to completely express that via some type of medium, any medium, is so hard and it takes a long time. I decided to buy the book and offer it to my daughter, and I have scheduled a popcorn session with her, to listen to the interview and pause when it makes sense to discuss and make sense of.
My daughter is fine, and will be fine, the school is great and there are many great teachers that have an interest in helping students grow AND have the right approach to do so, one of those teachers in her review called my daughter in the evening, offering her extra support, this is what critical mentoring with empathy means, and I for one believe much more in this approach.