Artist and Teacher, Teacher and Artist (x)

My program is Arts in Education, populated by lots of artist and teachers, some more one than the other. So it makes sense that our first assignment would have us grapple with these two identities. Here's my essay:


I proudly identify myself as a teacher. But I never identify myself outwardly, and rarely inwardly, as an artist.

I remember the first time I felt like I was a teacher. I was a few weeks into my student teaching in Danville, Illinois, and I had just begun to run the classes on my own. I had my first taste of the complexity, agony, and thrill of being a teacher. That night my punk rock band was playing at a local club, and as we were setting up our equipment, I looked up our drummer with a big, silly grin on my face, and I said “Jason, I’m a teacher.” I love meeting a new group of people, because the conversation inevitably turns to what you do for a living, and I’ll get to say “I’m a high school English teacher.” My match.com username is EnglishTeacher33, half of my conversations start with “I taught this one student who . . .”, and my five-year-old niece draws pictures of me in a classroom.

Teaching is the only thing I’ve ever done with full, conscientious effort. I’ve taken some good stabs at being a guitar player, a boyfriend, a student, and a swimmer. But only with teaching did I ever give everything I have. I don’t know why and I don’t recall ever planning it that way, but I’ve overworked myself as an educator for the past 15 years. It’s my most obvious identification.

But I never call myself an artist. I sometimes worry I bluffed my way into the Arts in Education cohort. I love the arts, I teach them obsessively, I find them essential, and I think they’re woefully undervalued and underrepresented in public schools. But I feel like I rarely engage in my own artistic production. My classmates in the AIE program seem to be fully-fledged artists; they love their art, they practice it regularly, and they have long resumes and dense portfolios. I love all of their varied art forms, and that’s why the cohort is endlessly engaging. But I’m not sure I’m one of them.

Of course being a good teacher is truly an art; it takes skill, flexibility, nuance, and intuition. Standing in front of a class of 30 high school students, I often feel like the conductor of a grand symphony. I register individual moods and classroom vibes, I play student comments off of each other, I adjust the pace of the class, I interject or stay silent depending on what the moment dictates. Or maybe I’m like a jazz musician, who has no set notes to play, but simply builds and improvises on what the drums and bass lay down. I use my here-and-now reactions to both follow and shape what is in the air that day. If I stayed with rigidly fixed templates things would seem mechanistic and bloodless, and no one ever described John Coltrane as mechanistic and bloodless.

So I think my teaching makes me an artist, but not my writing. And why not? For some reason I think you’ve got to put in the time before you can claim something as your identity. During the school year I work far more than 60 hours a week, so how could I not identify myself as a teacher? Whatever is consuming my life is worthy of being my label. If I was a writer, wouldn’t I be doing it all day?
But that doesn’t make much sense. I have put in my time as a writer—I have a creative writing degree from Northwestern. How many countless pages did I craft and revise for that master’s? What about all the lyrics I’ve written? My summer poetry workshops? And since when does calling yourself an artist have a minimal time requirement? If I was only teaching part-time, I would still call myself a teacher. Why won’t I do the same as a writer?

I can think of other moments that tell me I’m an artist. I never wrote of my own volition until I lived in Tanzania when I was 33. Because that year was such an intense and transformative experience, I found myself heading to the local internet café to send long e-mails to my family. When I got home to the states my mother gave me two large three-ring binders filled with print-outs of every e-mail, which would later become the raw material of my master’s thesis. I always say that I accidentally discovered writing when I was in Tanzania. I had no plans to write that much, and no plans at all to become a writer or get a writing degree. But I had stumbled upon a craft that felt like it was meant for me. Why hadn’t I discovered it before? Do I blame my education? If writing was a magnificent, transcendent art form, why didn’t someone show me when I was younger? Would it have been that hard? What were my schools making me do with writing that steered me away from all of its glory? Shouldn’t schools make the potential love for a topic the first order of business?

But Tanzania isn’t the only time that I felt like a real artist. When I was getting my degree at Northwestern, I recall working on a poem about Andrew Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. I babysat for my sister one evening, and after I put her daughter to bed, I sat at her computer and pleasurably agonized over the poem; I adjusted a comma here, rearranged a rhyme scheme there, wrapped myself up in the lines of the poem. I felt the rush of being in the moment of creation. I understood for the first time the meaning of “starving artist,” since I would have gladly given up food if I could feel that way all the time. Or maybe I wouldn’t starve, because making art felt like nourishment itself.

I recall another assignment from my master’s degree that made me feel like an artist. I was writing a science fiction piece about three white men in a high rise that perpetrated all of the evil in the world. It was my summer vacation and I wasn’t teaching, so I had time to luxuriate in the dialogue and scenes I was crafting. One morning I woke up with nothing on my schedule except to revise, and I was struck by my feeling of anticipation. It reminded me of Christmas mornings as a child, when I would wake up excited, because a new toy was waiting downstairs. Writing my science fiction story was playtime, an activity done for its sheer intrinsic joy. Which is something an artist would say.

So what is going on here? I have every reason to call myself an artist. I’ve put in the time, I’ve written a lot, and I’ve felt the artist’s rush. So why don’t I call myself an artist? What am I avoiding?

Maybe the answer is this simple: I don’t think I’m very good. Sure I hopped on stage to scream my lyrics with my punk band, but it’s easy to hide your insecurities behind walls distortion and eardrum-tearing volume. But to this day I’m still insecure about my writing. Recently I had my first poetry workshop class, which is mostly filled with brilliant undergraduate writers. I spent the entire three hours wondering anxiously whether I was good enough to be there. Why am I like this? Is it because Mr. Janke cut me from chorus in 5th grade since I couldn’t sing on tune? Is it because no one showed me I loved to write when I was young, and I didn’t have sufficient time to settle into the term “artist”? Is it from long-standing insecurities that only a qualified psychoanalyst could untangle? Well, whatever the reason, I don’t have a good reason to not call myself an artist. In fact, it shouldn’t have anything to do with how good I am; what’s more important is for me to get back that feeling that comes in the throes of creation. Since when do you have to be good at something to do it? I should take Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice and “follow my inclination rather than consult my ability.” That way I’d get to do what is fun all the time, accolades and criticisms be damned. Better yet, I should take my cue from Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When someone told him he couldn’t be the lead singer of a band since he can’t stay on tune, he responded, “Who made those rules?”