On Teaching

I started out in my day-job career with teaching. I didn’t study education or go down the route of certification, but I thought I might want to do that later, so I searched and searched and interviewed during my post-graduation summer, while I was working full-time running staff at a summer camp that only stayed in one location every week. That summer, as we drove down the 580 freeway at sunset in big vans, headed to our next college campus home for the week, the sunset over the velvety mauve hills of northern California in midsummer gave me strong punch of intuition that only took the form of the conscious thought that “I could live here.” In that moment, dreamily watching an oddly-shaped hill formation that looked a bit like Honolulu’s Diamond Head, for no reason I could name, I just felt a conviction that I could make a life in that place.

Less than 4 weeks later, I was driving up the road to my new teacher orientation at a school. With a surreal clarity of that memory from the summer, I realized as I followed my Google maps printout that the school sat directly at the foot of that very same oddly pyramid-shaped hill, just off the 580 freeway in a windy pass above the tri-cities area between San Jose, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

I’ve had premonition-type moments of knowing like that at some points in my life, and I’ve just taken it with a grain of salt and a sense of gratefulness that I can count it as confirmation that I am where I’m supposed to be, in a way. A confirmation of sorts, for my doubting, second-guessing, maybe-I’m-crazy-or-just-very-wrong-about-everything self.

But signs are sometimes what we make of them. That strong sense of knowing was almost like something outside of my normal senses. Some might call it a leading. Some might call it God. Sometimes I wish I had that sense about other areas and times in my life, even now. Where did that sense of courage, a kind of certainty in the questions come from, and where is it now?

What did it mean that I left teaching at that school after 3 years, and the Bay Area altogether after 4 years? What happened to that sense of knowing then? Had I done what I was ‘led’ to do there, mission completed? Did I fail that sense of purpose somewhere, to be dismissed back to my hometown?

I certainly felt like a failure at the time. My car had broken down. My roommates were dispersing, I was searching for housing in a very expensive area on a too-small salary at a local church, and other job opportunities had failed to materialize.

But I can’t forget that sense of reality and peace that came with that almost-mystical sense of knowing that had settled me in that suburban corner of the Bay Area. I don’t know the why or wherefore of it. As Kate Bowler writes, Everything Happens for A Reason was a lie that I, too, loved when I was looking for meaning in my life, for explanations of purpose or, honestly, justifications for choices that I had made.

Teaching creates connections

The things I know to be true and purposeful about that first installment in a rocky road of adulthood and career are really few and far between. I have that sense of surety about moving there in the first place. I have lovely memories and difficult ones, of course—lifelong friends, friends who were part of that season only, and mainly-Facebook acquaintances who occasionally pop up in real life, including a former student or two who managed to reconnect after social media made it easier.

I do know that something has stuck with me about teaching. Or rather, teaching has stuck to me. At almost every stage of life since then, teaching has been a part of my life, as either a part of work or as a volunteer opportunity.

In the fifteen years since I started learning and working with encaustic art, I’ve taught casually, mostly because people had no idea what encaustic was and I had to demonstrate it in order for people to understand what the heck I was talking about. One friend got a group of people together and did a workshop in her home years ago, and during the early pandemic in 2020, after lost my day job in Educational Technology and my side gig teaching cooking lessons, and was isolated to my home, I thought “what better time to work on art than now?” but I struggled to get started on my own.

It took a friend asking if I would teach her friend, who also happened to be unemployed at the time, to do encaustic painting to change that. Cecilia found the process exciting and came over about 2 times a week for the next few months. Sometimes I’d work with her, sometimes I’d be doing other things, and then she started bringing other friends, too, each with something different to bring to the medium.

We’d set up food and drink in the kitchen, and then get to work in the studio. As summer approached, we worked outside in my driveway at a big table. We moved on to add figure drawing workshops locally, and people who came to my house to learn Encaustic invited me to their homes to learn textile work, jewelry techniques, or printmaking.

Being open to sharing what I’d learned opened all those doors and led me to so many great friends.

So, after moving several hours away in order to take an opportunity to settle closer to my family and recover from Seattle, I looked around for new opportunities to teach. In the years since moving away from Whatcom County and back, the Jansen Art Center had been established in my hometown to offer art classes. I met with staff at the Jansen to ask if they were interested in encaustic as a medium, and they were, but hadn’t been able to locate an instructor. I proposed an intro series of lessons, but wasn’t sure if enough people would be interested in signing up to make the class worthwhile.

To my surprise, 8 people signed up, almost all of them completely new acquaintances to me (and one old friend from high school). I carted over tub of supplies and set up early to get the wax melting. Once we got to know each other a little, teaching was the same as it always was—showing techniques, offering opinions and experience, making mistakes, correcting mistakes, and learning from mistakes (wait til the wax cools a little before going at it with a scraper!).

No one experienced major injury from torch, griddle, or heat tools by the time of this report, and my sister came along one evening to take some photos.

Among my students were beekeepers, artists, ceramicists, teachers, and photographers, and each one applied their own voices to the encaustic process. I know some of them are planning to keep going and I can’t wait to see what they make. I’m going to be teaching more soon at the Jansen, if you’re interested in taking classes, you can become a member here, or subscribe to get their updates. Classes usually open for registration on a quarterly basis.