Teaching Roots

I was trained as an illustrator and told, more than once, that my future was in studio work, visual development, concept art, freelance illustration. I chose a different direction. The further I went into commercial work, the more I wanted my skill to do something other than sell, to serve people's growth rather than the market. That pull toward meaning over product is what first moved me toward teaching, and it has only sharpened since.

The reason I trust that instinct is that I know firsthand what an art classroom can do, because one changed the direction of my life. I did not take an art class until the eleventh grade. It was the first room I had ever been in where my own way of seeing, ideas and feelings I had always assumed were too strange to belong anywhere, was not just allowed but treated as the point.

I had spent years in classes built around reaching a single fixed answer, where the process that got you there counted for nothing. This was the opposite. The same prompt produced thirty different responses, each one truly the student's own, and the difference between them was the lesson. For the first time, I saw room for someone who didn't fit the secure, predetermined path.

The teacher who built that room was Matthew Hedlund, and what he gave me was less technique than recognition. He made a place where students saw their own worth and grew confident enough to risk something real. I went into education to build places like that, to give children the experience of being seen and the skills to make meaning others can receive.

I also teach illustration for what it trains beneath the surface. To draw well is to observe and analyze before you make, the same close looking that underlies most of what people have ever invented. That way of seeing is not decoration on top of a "real" education; it is foundational, and it strengthens whatever a child later chooses to pursue.

I believe children are the part of the future we can still shape, and that a meaningful, well-built early experience of making is among the most lasting things I can offer them.