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Excellence
in Photographic Teaching Award
2006 WINNER
JOHN WEISS
Professor of Art, University of Delaware
Teaching Philosophy
I always go to sleep.
I come home from teaching, go straight to my sofa or bed, lay down my
weary head, and go to sleep.
There has never been a time - never - when I haven't come home from teaching,
totally spent, when all my resources - physical, mental, and emotional
- weren't completely used up. Then, just like cooked spaghetti, my brain
is wobbly, and I can no longer stand. And so, I collapse.
That's the truest thing I can tell you. Teaching takes everything out
of me, because I give everything I have to teaching. That's how much the
process means to me, how much students mean to me, how much photography
means to me.
From the first moment we meet, my aim is to establish a culture of excellence.
I demand excellence of my students, and I tell them they should expect
the same from me. There are no compromises in that regard.
We make a contract at the beginning of each semester. This pact says we
are responsible for ourselves, to one another, to the medium of photography,
to the pantheon of artists who came before us and who live among us. We
agree, in the words of Frederick Sommer, to do no less well than we can
do.
In my classroom, I address the crucial initiatives of what it is to be
alive, awake, and aware in this world. I want to awaken in students a
different way of seeing. I help them to see a new world, a world where
what once was seen as ordinary is now seen as amazingly extraordinary.
But there's more. I want to address how to dare to be your best self,
how to dare for great things, and why it is our duty to live a life greater
than our own.
Here's what's most central of all, and clearly the reason I collapse after
each class: it is my complete and unyielding duty to keep challenging
students to explore their minds and values, to keep prompting and supporting
them in their exquisite search for meaning and validation.
And then, and then, what students discover belongs to them. Each student
then rightfully claims these glorious, hard-won discoveries. They serve
as bedrock for their continued growth as both artists and people. It fuels
them, warming and encouraging them when they are lost, propelling and
heightening their joy when truths are found.
It takes everything I've got to give exquisite attention to every student.
It takes everything I have to keep pointing them toward meaning and to
the significance in their lives.
And having given all I have to give, I come home from a day of teaching,
and go straight to my sofa or bed, lay down my weary head, and go to sleep.
All photographs © John Weiss - 2006
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