Great Students

Today I am in Missouri seeing some of my family over spring break. Traveling for 10 hours yesterday and hanging out with my brothers made it so that I wasn't able to blog... but its good to be back and getting back to the writing!

Today is only one writing, it's a bit longer than the others I have shared so far (the limit I gave myself was 20 minutes instead of 10). The chapter is called "Great Students", in it, Natalie Goldberg remarks on how we all remember the great (and bad) teachers in our lives; those that helped shape us, guide us and, well, teach us. But she asks the question, "What about great students that we knew?"
She goes on to say that this writing is looking into negative space, focusing on what you have not noticed, like drawing attention to everything around a tree, except the tree itself.
As she says, "You're focusing not on the teacher but the key element that creates a teacher. No teacher exists without students."

So, here's to all the students that I have encountered in my life and to all the teachers that helped us get there... cheers!

"Great Students"

Great students in my life? That's a bit of a hard one; my mind is racing through a myriad of times spent in a classroom; grade school at a private christian school in Missouri, community college at Moberly and the study partners that I had, especially in history classes.
For me, history was always easy, but for many other people it's a tedious study up there like math is for me.
I remember my first art history class, there was this cute, little, out-going blond girl that mostly didn't have a clue about what was going on in class (nothing against blonds, I am still one if I had my hair ;), but she was fearless enough to ask people around her if they wanted to study together, and I said yes.
Most of the time it was just me and her going over my notes that I had taken in class (I took some seriously detailed notes, including small drawings of the pieces/art that we were studying), she would sit down at her kitchen table, pull out her notebook and we would slowly go over everything that we had covered in class; boiling everything down to a quick outline that can be looked over to help get over those pre-test jitters.
There were several people like that, we would get together at homes or local eateries, like Country Kitchen, and spend hours pouring over pages of notes of names, dates, babies (just kidding), places and pieces.

I remember my biology class and how all my classmates there worked hard to make sure that they got passing grades.
This was most exemplified by these green pieces of paper that we got before we took out biology tests.
Our teacher, handed out these blank "study sheets" that were on green paper, and the deal was, that we could write down as many notes, facts, definitions, etc. we could on those pieces of paper and we could use it for the test as a reference.
You should have seen how small people can write when they are allowed too.
I remember several sheets (my own included) where there wasn't a square inch of that paper that was not taken with some definition, concept, or scientific fact that I felt was need on that test.
I can only imagine the hours that we all spent writing and re-writing our notes so that we could get as much information as possible... fun times!

Other people that I can think of would have to be in art classes.
So many people would come in clueless about what they were to draw, paint, or make with clay.
They would struggle with taking a ball of clay and "centering" it on the wheel (that's when you would take the clay and throw it on a wheel and then apply steady pressure to the clay with your hands to make it so that it wouldn't be wobbling all over the place as you spun the wheel around).
They would start...

Times Up!

Looking forward to see what the topic is for tomorrow! Hope everyone is well and if your on spring break, I especially hope for you that you get some of the much earned rest that you deserve!
Take care everyone

-Eric Alan

PS. Brittany, you can borrow the book when I am done :)

Plain

Hey Everyone!
I read a couple of chapters from "Old Friend from Far Away" today by Natalie Goldberg. Most of them talked about mentors and teachers that we have had in our lives and how there memories, voices, remain with us throughout our lives and become apart of the legacy of who we are as we go through life.
In a great line Ms. Goldberg writes, "It is our hope that writing releases us. Instead maybe it deepens the echo. We call out to our past and the call comes back. We are alone-and not alone."

All that being said, here is our little memoir writing challenge for the day: Tell me about someone who was a true teacher for you. Don't be sentimental. Tell it straight and plain: who was this person? Go. Ten minutes.

"Plain"

His name is Fergus, he was my ceramics (pottery) teacher for two years; he was, and still is, a wiry older man with a love for his home state Kentucky.
He loves the smell of bacon but maintains the vegetarian life style and has never wanted to go back.
He lives in a small house in a suburb close to downtown and has taken the attic as his bedroom, so that his two kids can have their own rooms.

The man taught me more than just how to center a ball of clay on a moving wheel or the semantics of creating something that is not perfect and being ok with it; to even celebrate the beauty in its own imperfections...
As we say in the pottering community, "happy accidents".

Fergus is an avid bike rider all his life, this skinny man has remained the same weight since be was in high school (much to the chagrin of most of the woman that know him).
I learned from him how to compliment a woman, how to allow space for another to say what they will in the time that they say it and he opened me up to the wonderful world of coffee.
But most important of all, the man helped me to take time and "see" the beauty that was and is around me.
He taught me that it's ok to wait for relationships, and when a desire creeps over you to "have a girlfriend" to remind yourself that woman aren't fruit in a grocery store that you compare one to another, but that every relationship should start with a small conversation that is slowly grown between two interested people.
He's a man that every time I go home, I make sure that I sit down and have a beer with.
He's also a man that collects rocks on his dashboard...

Times Up!

Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow! It's good to be writing again.

Sincerely,
Eric Alan