This week John and Danny discuss teachers of their past, how they've "learned to learn", the role of teachers, the qualities they feel go into a good teacher, and how they try to apply those qualities as teachers themselves.
From Season 3 of "art for all," the Sketchbook Skool podcast. Join artists/authors, Danny Gregory and John Muir Laws in rich discussions about the creative process.
This week John and Danny discuss teachers of their past, how they've "learned to learn", the role of teachers, the qualities they feel go into a good teacher, and how they try to apply those qualities as teachers themselves.
From Season 3 of "art for all," the Sketchbook Skool podcast. Join artists/authors, Danny Gregory and John Muir Laws in rich discussions about the creative process.
Hi there and welcome to art for all the sketchbook school podcast. I'm Danny Gregory. I am a, an artist and a writer and a guy who has a podcast with his friend, John Muir laws. Here's John Muir laws. John, introduce yourself.
John Muir Laws:Hey everybody. I'm John I'm Danny's friend. And I've kind of have a scientific bent to the way that I think about things and use my drawings to kind of help me unpack the world for the sake of understanding. And just love the process of thinking and thinking.
Danny Gregory:Bent to use the word bent in describing yourself. I don't know. I'm actually not sure that's the right word, but okay. We'll go with bent here. He is the man with a bent, speaking of men with bents. Let's talk about, we're not speaking of men with scratch that. Generally what we do on this podcast, if you've never listened to us before, is we pick a topic and then we kind of try to stay on that topic for as long as, as the topic lasts. But occasionally we will end up deep into the woods far off the map. We'll see what happens today. So what is our topic day? Cause you pick today's topic. What is our topic?
John Muir Laws:I wanted to explore sort of learning how we learn. The role of teachers, what for us are kind of the, what makes a good teacher. And how can, I guess, from the perspective of the teacher, how can I be a better teacher from the perspective of the learner? How can I be really intentional about choosing the teacher? Because that makes it kind of the coach that you have to kind of pull you through. Something makes a big difference in the approach that you take and how do you find those sort of people and what do you do when you do
Danny Gregory:so, can you, when you were a kid, were there any teachers that you, that made a particular impact on you either?
John Muir Laws:Yes. Yes. The, well, what kind of give you the, the brief arc of my, are you talking about my sort of education in general? Or do you mean in a specific art.
Danny Gregory:No in any, in any old phone. I mean, cause I think, I think if somebody is a good teacher of any kind, we can, we can learn from that. So yeah.
John Muir Laws:My sort of arc was sort of, my background is I am dyslexic. I was struggling in school. This was just when the diagnosis of dyslexia was being hatched and the, it really wasn't on most teachers' radar. I had some teachers who thought that, you know, it was clearly just laziness and I needed to buckle down and, and, and work harder. But that wasn't, that wasn't what was going on in my brain. I had a number of very kind and well-meaning teachers as well, but they. They a lot of folks, we're not kind of, we're not really meeting, we're trying to kind of help this square peg fit through the round hole as best they could. It, by the time I got to high school, I had pretty much given up on myself. I, I decided that, you know, the, the easiest explanation for why I can't do the same sort of things that my classmates can do is that I am stupid. And I figured I've cam a dumb kid. And how are you going to, what are you going to do about that? Well I can be, I can be a disruptor. I can be the class clown. I can hide behind that mask and I can also stop. Because if I do my best and I fail I then go away that that's, that's, that's horrible. But if I didn't really try and I failed, well, maybe, maybe it was, it kind of was my, a little, just a little bit of extra armor for myself. There were, however, two teachers that I had in high school, one was a biology teacher named Alan Ridley. The other was a history teacher named Leroy, and they saw through that screen and they didn't need me to spell things, right. To get things, to jump through that hole. They met me where I was and engaged me with my idea. In a way that was really exactly what I needed at the right time. And in the mat, in a course of one year, those two men turned my world upside down and set me on the trajectory that I am today.
Danny Gregory:You're lucky you found them or they found you? Yeah,
John Muir Laws:the they, and a number of the other teachers that I had in the, of other teachers that I had, they, they were good people who were doing their best to help me. But yeah, there was something about just the, the, the, the approach that they had allowing me to spell it wrong, but express my ideas and that, that changed my world.
Danny Gregory:Yeah. That's interesting. So And did they orient you to what you have ended up focusing on with your life? Oh,
John Muir Laws:yeah. Decided I'm either going to be a historian or a biologist because of this. And it turns out that the historians have to read more. And because I am dyslexic that reading process is surprisingly challenging. You know, I want to just be able to pick up a book and flow into it, but I never really kind of reach flow with books. It's always just the it's it's work to get it in there. So what both biology, you know, I could look at you know, it's look at the flower, there's the flower in front of you, I'd be sitting in front of the real phenomenon, not, not an account of what this phenomenon was a hundred years ago. And so that so I became a biologist That perhaps if I had been easier for me to read, I would be a historian. Right?
Danny Gregory:Yeah. It's
John Muir Laws:interesting. Sent me on this track.
Danny Gregory:Do you do you, have you ever had any contact with them since, since you were in school?
John Muir Laws:I have, I have. And I've done my best to let them know that they changed my world. And also if you look in the books that I've written there the two of them are always in the acknowledgements.
Danny Gregory:Great. That's good. That's nice that you honor them that way. Yeah. I you know, I went to lots and lots of different schools because we moved so much when I was a kid, I went to something like, I don't know, 15 or 20 different schools and In different languages in different countries, different continents. So it was really kind of a, a blur a lot of the time. And you know, when I, I mean, I went from being, I mean, I think the first school I ever went to was in Pittsburgh and then none of the first school I went to was in Pakistan. And then I went to Pittsburgh and then we went to Australia and Australia went to two different schools and then you are moving all over the map. Yeah. Then I went back to Pakistan and I went to. School there. And then I went to Israel and I lived on a kibbutz and then I lived in a small town and went to a school there in Hebrew. And you know, so it was just, it was a lot of different things and I, I was always a new kid, so I don't think any teachers paid any particular attention to me. I think the most valuable thing any teacher did up to that point was when when I was living on this kibbutz and everybody, all the kids were Israelis and they all just spoke Hebrew, which I came to the school, literally not speaking a word of it. And the teacher said to me, just sit there at your desk and you can read read whatever books you want to, that you brought with you. And you just sit there, just do whatever you want. And that was actually. Sounds like strangely hands-off, but it was actually the way that I learned the language really quickly, because I just sat there and read my own thing, but also listened and I didn't have any demands on me. Like I didn't have to do any of the work that I did, but I kind of came to wanting to do it, you know, just cause I started to understand what they were doing. And then we moved to the small town. I went to an Israeli school there and there, there was, there were kind of, no concessions made for me. It was just like, you're just kind of a student. And I was, I wrote papers in Hebrew. I mean, I was 11, 12 at age and I did everything. I was just like one of the other kids literally a year after coming to a country that I didn't speak any language and didn't know anything about it. So, so that was like, immersion is something that I've continued to believe is like really important. Part of the process of learning is just like being around people, doing it. And I think about it thinking in terms of art education you know, you think about, you know, what art school did DaVinci go to? What our school did Michelangelo go to? Well, they went to the art school of being an employee, being, basically being an apprentice, working in, you know the studio of an artist and just kind of hanging around and doing stuff. And that's kind of how I, when I became. Professional. That's how I learned my job was, you know, so I think that that way of learning is, is really important learning by doing learning, by watching. And that's how, that's how we learn as small children. How do we learn to speak, speak in the first place? You know, we don't go to the there's. No, my parents aren't taught how to teach us. It's all instinct. Right. And we just, we watched people do stuff. We watch them do it over and over again. And then we try and do it ourselves. And first we don't know how to do it. And eventually we kind of figure it out and then maybe somebody will say it was then to do this, do it this way. But if you have the patience to just kind of be around other people who know how to do what you want to do, eventually you'll know how to do it. You know, I mean, I think there probably more efficient ways of doing it. And I think that that's basically what education is kind of it's job, an educational program. Its job is to be a bit more efficient, but the fact is kids go to school for. You know, with 13 years plus college to learn stuff. I dunno how incredibly efficient that is necessarily. I think it, I think school has a lot of other purposes besides just teaching people stuff.
John Muir Laws:Absolutely. But, but just sort of bouncing into that that there's sort of two thoughts kind of occurred to me. One is that the, we, we know that our kids can learn. I think what we grownups have to remember is that we have the same plasticity. We have the same abilities to continue to learn ourselves in our adulthood and that, that window doesn't close. You can still learn new skills. So the old dog can learn lots of new tricks and. That the more that we can kind of create an environment for ourself that's conducive to that the faster it will happen, but we are absolutely capable of continuously learning through it. We used to think that like the human brain developed you know, adding neurons and then somewhere in adolescents, it would stop growing. And you're just, that's kind of the package that you had for the rest of your life. And and Bob's your uncle. And, but now we know that the human brain continuously is all learning is laying down new neural tracks in your head, building new material in your brain, anytime you are learning anything. And that is, that realization is so important and so powerful because it gives you permission then to dive in and do the work to develop these new skills.
Danny Gregory:Yeah. I also wonder if as you get older, if you allow yourself to, you actually probably have the ability to learn better, right? You're less distracted. You're more motivated. You also have a history of learning, like, you know, that you know, that you're able to learn, cause you've learned many things in your life. So I would think that as you get older, you actually can be a better student, sort of the reverse of what
people
John Muir Laws:tend to think. That the part of what you're learning is you're learning how to learn. How do I learn? And also the more ideas you have in your head, the, the more that you can then come handle complexities and nuances that are. Are, are, are beyond what you can do when you just start you know, even listening, let's say listening to a piece of music, somebody I had a friend who took a class where the purpose of the class was to study one piece of music on forget whether it was classical or jazz, but the entire class was about this and this, this piece of music. And by the end of that class, there were just all these levels of when they listen to it, they said they can identify it. Now, all these levels of, of, of nuance and structure there, that they could then apply to listening to other pieces of music. And it made the process of listening to music even more enjoyable. But what they had done is they'd given themselves a scaffolding for thinking about things. And when they were just listening to it before their brain was just overwhelmed by all this noise coming in, but then they could understand that on a completely different level.
Danny Gregory:That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think learning to learn, I mean, a lot of ways that's probably what school school's most valuable thing is because I think so much of the knowledge and information we learn in school eventually ebbs away. Right? I mean, I, if you asked me to do trigonometry or, I mean, I don't even quite know what the difference is between calculus and algebra and trigonometry, anyone. I'm not even sure conceptually what those differences are, let alone all the information I spent so much time trying to learn and to memorize and, and you know, it's like you learn a language in school and unless you, unless you ever practice that language, unless you ever go to France or something, you're never gonna. You know, make you keep that information, but it's, it's sort of like building these pathways and building these experiences of how did I learn something, you know, because those are the things that are clickable. I mean, I've told this story before, but I I want to tell you it again, cause it's, to me it was really impactful. So when my son got into art school, we went to the Rhode Island school of design for a tour and we were going around the campus and we met, we went to the graduate department. It's a part of the graduate school department of furniture design. It wasn't anything that he was interested in, but it was kind of just part of the tour. We went there and there was a teacher there and I said to him, so what's the deal? Like what happens if you get a graduate degree in furniture design? Like, do you go and work for Ikea? Do you make like$10,000? Oh, coffee tables. Like w how do you apply this knowledge? And he said, well, he said, there's a bunch of different ways. He said, but that's not really the way to look at it. He said, ultimately, he said, learning, learning what every student who comes to learns is they learn how to be a creative person. They all come away with that same lesson. And he said, so what's important about that is it's really hard to learn all the things you need to be a creative person, but there are basic fundamental things. You need to learn how to have ideas. You need to learn how to collaborate with other people. You need to learn how to get feedback and handle it. You need to learn how to execute your ideas, how to find resources to help you do. There's all these basic things that doesn't matter, whether you're a filmmaker or a Weaver or a furniture designer, you're going to need these fundamental skills and they take a lot of work. And so what you have to do is you have to find something that you are passionately interested in because it's only by having that discipline, that you're going to be willing to put the work in. If you don't care, you're not going to do it. You know? And you think about how many things we learned in high school, how many things we had to take, the classes you had to take, and you just didn't care because you didn't care about the result. You didn't, you know, you, weren't interested in trigonometry, let's say, and no teacher made you interested in it. Then you didn't learn these fundamental things that ultimately with a real reason that you were there, you know? And so he said, so ultimately, what happens is you. Track that you're interested in, you know, and maybe you come in thinking I'm going to be a graphic designer, but then you fall in love with textile design and you, or you find a field that you didn't even know was a field. You didn't even know the furniture design existed, but suddenly you go, this is fascinating. I love this. And so therefore I'm willing to do all pull the all-nighters. I'm willing to, you know, do all the hard work that's required to do this thing. And when I emerge, maybe I'll become a furniture designer, but maybe I'll do something completely different. And my own son who was went there to study painting, he now works making props in the movies. But so many of those skills that he learned from painting are the skills that have allowed him to become a prop maker. Yeah. And so that, that, so I think that that idea of like, what are the foundational skills, what are the, what's the foundational knowledge you need is really crucial, you know, and I, I think, you know, I mean, I think we have a decent education program, but I think the fact that we have to educate as many people as we do, and there's, you know, everything's operating at scale and so testing and all these kinds of other things have kind of distorted the process, you know, but at its core, I think it's that, it's that like, what are the foundational things that you need to know and picking when it comes to art making, what are those foundational things?
John Muir Laws:I like that way of framing it. So you're, you're. You're creating sort of the fertile ground that all the rest of in the, in the scaffolding that okay. Mixing metaphors like a demon here. Not that demons are particularly known for making metaphors, but that's mixed too, but there's that you're, you're creating this really useful substrate for whatever you want to do in that. So I love it. That there's this program on furniture design that is not really about making furniture. Yeah, it is.
Danny Gregory:It's kind of like, it's kind of like you've built a machine and that machine can do lots of things. It's like a Swiss army knife, right? So you might use it to make machine. You might make, use it to make design furniture, but you might also use it to do animation, or you might use it to paint murals, but you're gonna need those same things. And when you come to school, when you come pick, you want to go to art school, what do you think you need? You need to be able to draw. Right. That's why, that's why people go to art school when they're in high school, they can draw. And so they get the come and, or they don't actually, I was surprised at how many kids went to Rosie and couldn't draw anything. My son was always marveling at that. Like, why do they even come here? They came there because they will weird kids. They were the kids like the blue hair. And that's why they ended up in art school, I guess. And your dose,
John Muir Laws:the M and w I think that the, the, the same also applies to something like, like medical school. My understanding is like for the first four years of medical school, th th th the stuff that you learned at the start of, of learning how to be a doctor, you're never going to get. And this stuff, but what you're doing each year is you're kind of ratcheting up your ability to kind of put these ideas together and sort of how to think like a doctor and you're preparing your brain for when you're finally in fellowship at the end of your training, that in those couple of years of fellowship, that's where you're going to learn 90% of the stuff that you're going to use every day on the job. But either we couldn't start there cause you needed to, to, to create the brain scaffolding and the all the rest of my mixed metaphors for, for, for being able to understand and integrate. That information that you finally are going to get at the end of that training. Right? Cause if you're
Danny Gregory:a doctor, you know, you have to read the medical journals that come out every month. You know, you have to, you're constantly having to continue to be educated for the rest of your career because there are developments in science that are important for you to know about. So, you know, if you could just learn, if you could just graduate from medical school and then boom, you're done, you can just be a doctor forever. No, you have to learn these. How do you update yourself? How do you continue to stay current that's yeah, that's essential. So you have to, you have to be in love with learning. I think, I think we talked about this a while ago about organic chemistry and how like that organic chemistry class. I remember it from college. I didn't take it because it was like unbelievably hard and they basically use that class. Weed out all the people who thought they wanted to be doctored, but couldn't actually be bothered to do the work. Right. And I think that that's true in a lot of disciplines. It's like part of education's job is to just filter people so that they, you know, end up in the right area for them.
John Muir Laws:It would be nice if it was filtering us so that people end up in the right place for themselves. Another way of looking at it is that the education system may be a filtering system so that people kind of run you know, kind of ended up being the right kind of cog in the machine that the larger institution needs, but that may not be the right place for that person as an individual. So that,
Danny Gregory:because there are always jobs. Tell me, how does somebody decide that that's what they were going to do for a living, right? There's all kinds of obscure jobs and you go, ha did you always want to be like an air conditioning repair person? Did you always want to be, you know, whatever it is. No, but there's there's systems that kind of funnel people into that. And that's what the opportunities lines. So anyway,
John Muir Laws:and also the career that we, we choose to to make our, the money, it doesn't have to be something that is you know, what inspires us in, in life. And it gives us our meaning. It's nice when it does work out that way, but you can also be doing a job that that, that pays your bills, but then also have the bandwidth for whatever creative expression you want to take or other things that kind of give your, your world and, and life meaning. But maybe people
Danny Gregory:end up in. I'm sorry, go ahead.
John Muir Laws:I was just going to end it, but, but having that kind of growth mindset again is important for being able to sort of see that you can develop those, those other regions and areas of, of, of, you know, to be like realized you can pick up the pencil and you can learn to draw. You can pick up the ukulele and you can learn to play a musical instrument. You can build those. You can bring those elements into your life and still something that you can learn at any age, but
Danny Gregory:in your case, your teachers, maybe not deliberately, but your teachers kind of found or help you helped you to find a place of utility. Right? Cause you could have ended up, you know, doing something that used your abilities much less so, right. Because you had this limitation. There are certain things you weren't good at or certain things you weren't predisposed to, but, but part of the process of going to school was to eventually find areas that you were really interested in and that you could apply your, your strengths to, right. So that you ended up being, do you think that, you know what I'm saying?
John Muir Laws:I, I think you're right. I was lucky to be able to, to fall into studies that I was excited about and was interested in, I really liked nature and who was very interested in that. And so that kind of went along with the, the, you know, being a biologist, being a, being a scientist and being able to, to look at those those, those sorts of phenomenon.
Danny Gregory:Right. Yeah. But you found people who helped to guide you. Yeah. So let me ask you, let's talk about, about ourselves as teachers because that's part of what we both do for a living now. And did you, have you been a teacher for a long time and do you feel like
John Muir Laws:I kind of came here? My path on, on teaching is that I started off. I started with an interest in, in nature science and natural history and was doing was, was teaching things sort of to, to pay my bills, thinking that at some point I would kind of graduate to becoming a Farley Mowat character, running off into the wilderness, somewhere, tracking Yagi antenna. And, and like, I'm going to be doing all this original research that's who I that's where I thought my trajectory was, but it wasn't. So my cause, you know, here's what happened. I started off I as my first job was teaching. So I was teaching nature at a boy scout camp, teaching nature, merit badges. And then I became a director of the the nature department at the boy scout camp. Still teach. Nature. And then during college, I became an interpretive student aid working at a, at a local nature, preserve teaching nature. But, and so not just sort of, you know, doing research, but, but teaching, and then in the summers, I would work at the Teton science school. I would work at different environmental education organizations. I then worked as a teacher at a residential outdoor science school where groups of fifth and sixth graders would come up for a week and I would teach nature to them. And and then I thought like, and now it's time for me to go be a scientist. So I went off to graduate school to become a wildlife bio. And during that time I was doing my research, but I realized that one of the things that I really am loving is that I get to be a teaching assistant while I'm, you know, to pay my bills here at, at, at school. And I just, you know, I love geeking out doing that and, you know, just realize that my, my, I just love the idea of kind of taking ideas and concepts, trying to help figure out, like, how are these relevant? How can I explain that in a way, or, or present this in a way that somebody can, that it can open up a door to somebody that it, that it makes sense that, so I just found myself teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching. That was the substrate that really motivated me if I teach a class. And I feel like that came out really, really well. I like that. I. Big slosh of dopamine that my brain gets. I find that the process of trying to, trying to teach challenging, because I have to force my brain to wrap around something enough that I can then make it accessible to somebody else. So it can be teaching it's it's my jam. It's my identity. And what about for your, for yourself? How did you come to be?
Danny Gregory:Yeah, I mean, one question before I say that, I want to say, how did you learn to be a teacher? Did you study to be a teacher?
John Muir Laws:I, I would take there, there, there were, it comes from two things w Y lots of different. So part of it is that you can, there are books on, you know, here's how to be a nature guide. There are books on a, for a park interpreter. Here's how you, how you do these things. There are classes that you can take to do a project, wild workshop, wherever they're going to teach you all these activities and games and things that you can play that get sort of address different environmental concepts. There's also looking at the examples of people who are good teachers and watching them at work and seeing what they do. And, but the, the most interesting kind of change in my teaching came about through just my own direct observation. It's not something that I, I learned in any book, but from my interactions with students, I was, I was working at the Walker Creek outdoor school. So. We could get a different batch of fifth and sixth graders. I could bring them out into the field all day with little bag lunches. And I had this block of time to connect them with nature. And I was doing what I thought I was a good nature guide should be doing. I was doing these environmental education games. I was you know, some plant identification and these sorts of things. And I had the subjective experience that, all right, I'm being, I'm a good teacher, right? My, the students liked me. I had good classroom control. They gave me good evaluations. So what could possibly going go wrong? Well, I realized that something was going wrong because I. My, my prep area for the next day was across a very flimsy divider from a place where the teachers at the end of the day would meet with their students and talk with the kids about what did you do during the day? And they would say what we went to here, we did this, we did this, we did this. You know, how do you like your naturalista? We think, we think Mr. Jack is great. And and what did you do? Well, we went and we played these games, you know, and they would essentially describe playing tag, which is kind of the, the, the background of this game. Like I had been thinking to myself, like, no, but you're, you're, you're the Jack rabbit and you're the Fox and I'm teaching about food web. So I got all these good of glorious plans of like what I'm teaching and the kids were playing tag. And I was, you, you were teaching. I was, yeah. And there, it was, it was great and they were outdoors and that was fun. And, you know, we climbed to the top of the peak and all those good things. But a lot of the stuff that I thought I was teaching was not what was being learned. And as during this time, in my own free time, I would be grabbing my sketchbook and I would go out and draw flowers. And the foxes are of some very cooperative Fox in this area and the deer and make little landscape drawings. And when I'd be out with my students during our lunch breaks, I'd pull out my journal and just start sketching and journaling. And the kids would start watching this. And they said like, oh, can we do that too? And the kids turned out that during their lunch breaks, they wanted to be doing nature journaling with me. And so I started making little nature journals and bringing them in we'd pass them out during lunch. And then I thought, well, wow, And then they would come back and they would say, you know, like, oh, and then during lunch, we got to do this nature journaling thing. And like, look, we're looking at this and look at this flower that I was observing and the shape of the mountains, the kids were doing incredible nature observation during those times. And I realized that that's much more valuable than this other stuff that I thought I was supposed to be doing. So I just started gradually, the more that I, I turned my curriculum over to, let's go outside with a group of kids, you know, climb a mountain and do some nature journaling together. It really got kids observing and connecting with that place in a way that was profoundly different. And that changed the way that I taught. And it got me started teaching nature, journaling from those observations to those kids.
Danny Gregory:I mean, it makes, it makes a lot of sense. It makes sense that keeping a journal. Would be a great way to observe nature and the observing nature is a great way to learn about it. I mean, it's seems like a pretty linear thing. It's, it's almost surprising that that isn't a standard part of the curriculum, you know, but maybe it's again people's. I mean, I, I, I remember being I was doing residencies in a bunch of international schools and I was trying to explain to teachers, I gave a presentation to teachers talking about how keeping a sketchbook could be a way of learning, basically anything that you could have, you know, you could study history in a sketchbook that you could certainly study science and nature and a sketchbook that really could fit into so many different things. And that we think of art as being this sort of niche kind of after the side thing. But how, in fact, when it's brought into the center of what you're doing. It becomes just a way of engaging differently, but the teachers themselves, I think we're so averse to personally drawing that, the idea of asking, you know, cause I was showing like I was showing how to tell a story using drawing. And I was saying like, let's try and make a six frame comic strip about a story from your family. So instead of writing short story, let's do that and let's break it down into things. And kids were completely comfortable with that. They were comfortable with the idea of drawing. They were comfortable with the idea of comic books. You know, and certainly there are places where graphic novels and comic books are part of the curriculum, but not making them. But I think that doing something like that, breaking a story down into sort of six frames is a way of getting to its essence. And if you can get to its essence, that's a great way to learn, to be a writer. As to work down this essentials and the structure of a story through that kind of a thing. But I found that the limitation was the teacher's aversion to drawing in this particular case. But I think
John Muir Laws:that that's very, very true cause cause the teacher, like if, if I'm supposed to teach let's say I haven't looked at trigonometry in years and all of a sudden I'm supposed to teach trigonometry. I'd better be good at trigonometry in order to be able to do that. So people, th the teachers think that in order to teach art, they need to be a practiced artist themselves. That's not in their comfort zone, that's a threat. And if they have a bit of a fixed mindset and I think people often have a fixed mindset about their artistic capabilities that's, that's, that's dangerous. Oh, I've no way would I want to do that? No, exactly.
Danny Gregory:Yeah. I mean, it would be weird to have kids be better and better at what you're teaching, but I don't know. I mean, to me, I remember the first time I had to start teaching was I was asked to teach a class on drawing and it was at this sort of, it was what was it called? I can't remember. It was, it was a place in New York and they asked me, they said, would you be in, it'd be open center. They said, would you be interested in teaching a class here? And I was like, I guess I dunno why I even said that, but, but they said yeah, there'll be like a five or six week class. And you'll have like three hours. I honestly, I had no idea what to do. I'd never taken an art class. I really hadn't. Since maybe high school I'd taken it, but I'd never taken a class. I'd never learned how to be a teacher. I had, no, I had never gone to a workshop. I had no idea what it was. And I was extremely anxious that I would, that my inability or lack of knowledge about this would be really obvious, so massive you know, imposter syndrome. Yeah. So I super over-prepared and I had, you know, like hours of slides and, you know, incredibly complicated assignments and all this stuff. And You know, so these people came and eventually I kind of saw that it was really tedious. Like I'm standing there presenting a PowerPoint presentation for half the class. And it just, it got eventually that kind of lightened up. But I remember then the next thing I had to do is I had to, I led a three day workshop in Massachusetts. And again, I was incredibly ill prepared. I was completely over-prepared and therefore ill-prepared so I just thought like, okay, I need to give them a huge amount of information. I need to make this seem to be a really valid to justify this client. Like, yeah. Like, who am I like, you know, like, how do I assert my Situation my, you know, my right to do this. And people just want to come and draw. They just want an X, they just want an excuse to draw, you know, I'm going and taking a workshop and we're just going to sit around and draw. And it took me really a long time to get over that. And I just, I just try to try to avoid being called a teacher because I felt so insecure about it. And then when I was doing this programs in schools, you know, I was doing, I was treating these things like as if I was doing like a keynote presentation at a conference. And you know, just sit there and just please just don't ask me anything until I get through this. And or I was treating it like a business presentation and took me a while to finally start to think about how I learned stuff and how. What is the process that I'm going through? What are the things that mattered to me? And when I was learning something, what was, and it also, how you don't really need to learn that many things in a given education situation for it to be really valuable. If you take away like two ideas, that might be all you need for, to make a radical transformation in your, in your practice or whatever it is. And that kind of made it easier because I started thinking like, what were the things that are really important? What are the real points? And it's not. And I also started to think about teachers who mattered have mattered to me, tend to be teachers who I had some kind of a personal connection to that. It wasn't just their, the material and their grasp of the material, but like, How did it S were they the kind of people I wanted to be like in some way? And did they seem to have an, a really authentic connection to this stuff so that it really seemed to matter to them? You know, were they really interested in history? History? History is a subject that as an adult, I'm fascinated by. I read a lot of books about history, but in high school, I couldn't have cared less as we bolted through like 250 years of American history in oh eight. And I was like, oh my God, this, like, there was no, but when you start to tell stories and you start to make things relevant, then, then my imagination is ceased by it. And I, I start to get excited too, and I want to learn more and I want to find out on my own and I want to make it my own.
John Muir Laws:That, that last point, I think is that's, that's a really powerful take-home in this, that the idea that if you can. Just of going back to my, my hero, my, my history teacher, Leroy Voto, I re I remember being in a class with him on the, on the French revolution. Right. And you can see this, something were in you could have a a kid in high school sitting there saying like, you know, why should I care about this? But one thing that he got, we kind of came across in the course of this class is we got a sense of why Lee, Roy thought this was. So he, why he felt that this was so worthwhile of, of his time of our time. And we kind of, we got that sense of, of excitement. Why is it that this is something that you'd be so passionate about? That you would devote your life to, to studying, to researching, to, to, to sharing with other people, if, but think about that in terms of a statistics class. When I was at university of Montana, we had the graduate students, the other graduate students, and I, we were to take this statistics class and the teacher who was giving us that statistics class. In so many words explained to us that we were, we were lazy. We didn't understand, we didn't appreciate statistics and that we were going to fail and we were, and nobody was learning anything. And it was such an infuriating thing because statistics is, is actually this incredible. Fascinating area of how can you, how can you get your brain to think in a way that is outside of our brains sort of usual box. So kind of learning from anecdote in story, how can we look at the power of numbers to, to help us see patterns that are there and weed out the patterns that are not that's super useful? I'd say probably one of the more important for then people to learn trigonometry would be for people to get an understanding of statistics. Sort of a side note. I think that like the lottery it's, it's a tax on people who haven't taken statistics. The
Danny Gregory:there's that book, there's a book that was in a podcast called Freakonomics that explained basically economic. As storytelling in a way and how fascinating economics can be. Economics is again, something that I remember taking in college. And I mean, now I wish I could go back and take economics again, you know, cause it seems so relevant to just every aspect of life and certain teachers by who understand that and can communicate that passion can make it really exciting. I remember in college, I had a, I had a teacher, his name was DW Robertson Jr. And he was the world's leading expert on Chaucer. And again, Charleston was something I'd never really read, but we read the Canterbury tales. We spent the whole semester just reading the Canterbury tales and he made the Canterbury tales, which we were reading in middle English. He made it so fascinating and so exciting. It was like watching the best movie. And every year he would read, there was one particular tale. I think it was the Miller's tale. He would read it and. People who had graduated 20 years before would come back to school just to listen to him, to give this lecture again, because it was so electric, so fascinating. And you think like people who, who are, who really get what they're teaching and really understand, it can make it come alive, no matter how tedious it would seem to be. But,
John Muir Laws:but just to, to, so that, that experience of people kind of coming back for that lecture on Chaucer, read in middle English, that where you're, where you're going to electrify the room that actually can be done with statistics. What the graduate students and I did is we quit our class mitzvah a semester. We all decided we're not going to do this anymore. We found there's a how it was this this one professor in the forestry department, who was, he was this, he, he was an immigrant from, from Germany. He had all sorts of wonderful, quirky mannerisms. He had learned all the idioms of the day. You've been told that the hardest thing to learn about English is the idiom. So he decided he was going to invest in that. And he did that somewhere just after the sort of post-war and never updated any of his idioms. And but he was passionate about statistics and the thinking behind it and why it's useful. And. We asked this person, would you we have quit our class on statistics. Would you please would you take up the, the mantle of this for us? We want you to teach us statistics and we, we want to do it in a way that's going to be useful and practical, and it absolutely came alive for all of us. And we also got a sense of why this, this, this, this, it was this really little guy. Why this, why this little man with a heavy accent, why he was so excited about it and that joy of playing with numbers and thinking in this way he transferred to all the students in that
Danny Gregory:class. Yeah, that's a real gift. I mean, I think, look, you're a good teacher. In part, because you love what you're doing, you do it, you practice it yourself. And so you're able to give people experiences that help them to capture your enthusiasm for it. I think for me, when I started to teach people how to do illustrate journaling, there were times where I would deviate from my passion, because to me, the thing that I really wanted to, that I love the most is just kind of drawing stuff in my life. You know, it's not, it's not particularly deep in terms of, and I always wondered, like how do I actually teach people that, you know, it's, it's a sort of specific thing to me. And I started to realize that I, when I started to think that I should teach them other stuff, I should teach, teach them how to draw people. I should teach them how to do, you know, draw cars and how to draw buildings. And I kind of drifted away, I think, from why I was doing that, because I'd never learned how to draw people or to learn how to draw cars, particularly. I just. Draw a car because I thought it was a cool car or I was drawing a street scene of a place that meant something to me. And therefore I had to learn how to draw a building and how to draw the car outside of it had drawn people. I had the reason was I wanted to tell the stories of these and it was easy for me to lose track of that because I thought, well, that's not really what people teach. Like they teach these basic skills of drawing and painting, and I should teach people how to use watercolors, but I'd never learned from anybody. I just kind of figured it out by doing it. But I felt like, well, if I'm a teacher, I should do these things. And increasingly, and this is true of so many things that mattered to me is I've realized that like specificity is. Really important next, the specifics of the niche that you're in, if you can focus on the niche that you're interested in and just delve deep into that, you don't have to be a generalist and in anything being a generalist, there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of other people who can be generalist, but if you're interested in a very particular thing and you can get really deep into it, some people will want to know that stuff and they, and those are the people who you will teach the most easily. And they'll be at the most out of what you're teaching. So it's not like being part of the, going to teacher's college and coming out and going, like, I guess I'll be an English teacher. If you can do something that's that's and I think no matter what it is, you're teaching, if you can find again, what is that personal connection to yourself? What is the thing that really matters to you? It's really rich and endless. But I think if it doesn't come from that point, so in a, in a way I'm seeing two things. Cause earlier I giving that example of learning the fundamentals. I think you need to learn the fundamentals, but then you need to learn. The two in-group engage in the authentic, passionate thing you have and plug that into those fundamentals. Those two things, it's kind of like, I have a car, but now I need to drive somewhere I care about. So, you know, so it's like the operating of the car is like the basic things I need to know, but now I'm going off on an adventure and I'm going to use this ability. I have this structure, this framework, but I'm going to fill it with what really matters to me. And if I do that, I'll continue to refine the structure. I'll continue to get better and better at using it. And I will also, you know, and I'll get deeper and deeper into the thing that I'm passionate about.
John Muir Laws:And I find that when I'm trying to learn something new, if I can see myself using that or even see myself teaching that my brain absorbs it much more easily. But if I don't see how that's relevant to me, then my brain doesn't want to pick that up and, and play with it.
Danny Gregory:I don't think that's true of learning as well. That like, when it comes to learning, if you want to learn whatever it is, you want to learn, like, figure out why you want to learn it. You know? Like, what is it about like, like I've had that experience of like, I'd love to learn to play the piano, or I'd love to learn to play the guitar, but then. I don't know that there's anything. I particularly want to be able to play on the piano or the guitar to warrant going through all the work I'm going to have to do to learn them, these things. I just sort of liked the idea of that, but it's not a, it's not a deep enough passion and intensity for me to actually go through the pain of having to practice scales and do all the other crap that you have to do to learn something. So you've got to in the end, have a real good reason for wanting to learn this bigger thing. And as, and as adults, that's what we can do. You know, I mean, you might just have the passion to live. Right. You might just say, I just love learning stuff, you know, learning new and different things. I don't know how deep you'll ever get with any particular area of knowledge, if that's your thing, but you'll have fun learning. But also I think if you do have a skill, like really try and figure out why is this, that you want to learn this particular thing? And it's not because you wanted to do it when you were 15 in that particular way, but you might've wanted to do it since you were 15. And now's the time that you actually have the time and resources to do it, in which case, like try and get back to what was that real reason. And how can you be passionate about it? Yeah.
John Muir Laws:Yeah. That sort of ties into sort of the, just all the thinking around intrinsic motivation. So how do you get yourself to be motivated from the inside? Not because you're going to get not for the grade and not for the cookie that you're going to be given, not because of the salary. How can you get yourself to be driven by. Bye bye. What you do. People one way framework that people have come up with for for, for thinking about that is sort of three factors, mastery, purpose, and autonomy that, and here, you're really talking about purpose, pay attention to your purpose of why you are wanting to do this. What why this thing just sort of is, is, is meaningful and motivating to you. And the more things that the more that it ties into, like for instance, like some people are really, really into their pets, right? So I would say taking classes on drawing sports cars, not going to be your thing, but, but to, to then, you know, to, to draw your case, 500 times, because you are crazy about your cat. You can get into that and you're going to get better and better and better. And, and because it's connecting with something that you really love, you're going to be able to do that more. And the other thing that's really cool about that is that the other, another piece of the, of the pie of intrinsic motivation is this idea of, of mastery, knowing that having a growth mindset, knowing that through my work and my effort that I'm going to get better and you can sit there and feel like this feels difficult to me, this feels really, really challenging to me. And no that that's not the reason that you should give up, but, but know that that is that's the feeling of your brain growing and that through that work, you're, you're getting better and. Then to have the autonomy, to be able to say, like, I really am into my cat and you know what, I'm okay with that. And two so those autonomy mastery and purpose those ideas, those tie into how we learn. And if we, as educators can help people find and follow what is what they are passionate about. And also as educators help people really come back to again and again, the messages and lessons of the growth mindset, the degree to which this actually is something that I can do and it's getting better and it will continue to get better. The more that I, I strive and work in this area. Good. Well,
Danny Gregory:feels like a conclusion. I feel like I, I feel like I haven't held up my end on this conversation today. Cause I feel like a little bit out of my depth. I haven't thought that much about, about it. I thought a bit about it. It's ironic. Cause I, my businesses that I run a school, the thick over thought about teaching a bit more, but feeling that anyway. Yes. Oh,
John Muir Laws:I've, I've, I've, I've really enjoyed hearing your, your, your thoughts in, and, and ideas about this. There's one other point that I actually wanted to kind of bat around with you. All right. If, if we could, and that is sort of the, the dueling forces of inspiring people and demystifying the process. Like something that I think about in terms of art teachers, something that, you know, when I look at their work, if I go like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. And I have no way of unpacking. All right. That deflates me. So how, what are your thoughts about the degree? You know, sometimes what I, I find that sometimes people will look at, or I'll look at people's drawings and that kind of fixed mindset, voice will kind of come up like, oh, that's just so good. Right. And I'm not, and it can be the, the, the ease with which some of the apparent ease with which somebody kind of does something. And the, the quality of it, I can start judging myself and that de-motivates me, or I can be looking at that same sort of thing. And be motivated like, oh, wow. Like that's something that I can aspire to. How do we, as teachers kind of walk that line between inspiring people demystifying it so that it makes it something that I'm kind of clear that I can do. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on balancing those sorts of, of factors or how those pieces sort of play in together.
Danny Gregory:Yeah. And I think over the years that I've run schedule school, I've hired probably a hundred or more instructors, you know, and when I go out and look for somebody who's going to teach a sketchbook school there, they have to be able to make art that you'd like. You know, they have to be like they have to be good in that way. They have to be a good teacher, which is a very different thing. And they have to be able to teach and sort of manage and present themselves live, you know, in this way. And there's a lot, a lot of people who are great illustrators, you know, and you look at their work and you go, that's so cool. And they're terrible teachers. They're just incapable of explaining what they're doing in such a way that, so, and I think that that happens a lot of times people say, ma can you hire so-and-so I love their work and I'll go. And I'll quickly find that like, this person cannot break it down. And I, and I think I struggled with that initially too. How do you reverse engineer? What you do so somebody else can learn what it is. I find that in the end, there's some technical things that. Instructors can teach you how to use a particular medium you know how to, like, for instance, we just did a class on a workshop on watercolor pencils, and this instructor showed how she used an ordinary ordinary kitchen, cheese grater, or a strainer strainer to make these like little spatters you go, oh, that's a really cool technique, you know? And she sort of talked us through it and you afterwards, you said, oh, like I've seen that. And I have no idea how you do that and now I know how to do it. So those kinds of like, okay, now I get it. Things are a small part of what I think teaching art is. Right. And I think that, I think there's a lot of people who go on YouTube and they, they look for instructional videos. Like how do you draw a dog? You know, or what are the steps that I take, you know, to take, to get to this end result, you know, and they break it down and he was like 15 steps. First draw circle, then divide it in half, all those kinds of steps. I don't think again, that particularly helps you to make art either. You know, I think in the end, so much of it is about how do you give me confidence? So again, if you're really good and I can't even vaguely approximate what you do, it shatters my confidence. It doesn't build my confidence. Confidence is really important in art making, because ultimately the core of art, I think is authenticity expressing who you are as an individual and you need, and that takes, that takes some guts, right? And it takes then take some, some time to kind of get into it and to. Allow yourself to be who you are, if you're really intimidated or you're faced with failure over and over again, and no rewards from it, then, then you just can't get to that point of authenticity and so much of style. Isn't technically. It's authenticity. It's like, what are the things? And you might look at a lot of artists and say, I really liked their work and I'm absorbing it. But ultimately it comes back to who are you and what are you going to do? So I think creating an environment like that, and that goes back to the example I gave of, you know, that teacher who let me sit in the back of the classroom and just kind of read books and absorb my own way, absorb an entire language just by sitting and listening to it. And that's kind of true when you teach kids how to walk or how to use the potty or how to read a book. It's right. It's, it's a customized kind of thing based on your knowledge of them and where their strengths are and how do you keep them engaged and interested in what motivates them? It's all personal. It's not about a system. You can read all kinds of books on how to teach a kid to walk, but ultimately it's feeling, and it's like it's connection and it's noticing and empathy. And I think that's what good teachers are. Is there people who, you know, can make you feel connected to them, can make you see it from their point of view, who you take for granted knows all this stuff, whether they do or not, but that's really less of it. And I think it's more about this environment. I don't know, but I'm speaking as somebody who never watched a teacher's college and probably doesn't know what he's talking about much of the time. So anyway,
John Muir Laws:but you have a contract record of finding things that work
Danny Gregory:that's in the end. That's, that's really what it is like, how do, how do you make something that works? How do you figure out what you need now to do this thing? And I think, again, going back to these first principles, what are the things that you need to do to to have confidence and to have a framework, but then a lot of it, the rest of it is just practice and trial and error and stuff. Anyway. All right. I think we are. We have, we have I think we could go on talking about this. I'm feeling a little insecure though. Honestly. Cause I feel like, I feel like I can imagine there's a lot of teachers listening to this and saying, what the hell is, what the hell are they talking about? But, but anyway
John Muir Laws:I think you're selling yourself short because of well then I'll, I'll, I'll see your humility there with some gratitude for what you have done in making a carefully curated collection of teachers and, and, and sources of inspiration and putting those. In front of people at a pace that they can absorb and learn with. Cause I think you've got a track record of what you're doing and your approach to it
Danny Gregory:actually works. No, I think that's true. And I, I appreciate your pointing it out. You know, I think, I think in the end I've learned to teach because I've learned to teach myself. I think that's been the core of it. I think most of the books I've written have started from a point of like, where's the book I'd like to read, you know? And then I couldn't find it. So I wrote it. Yeah. And I think similarly with like, there were no classes on how to do sketchbook journaling, it didn't exist. So we kind of made them and you kind of figure it out as you go. But it's, it's an interesting process. As he's making this podcast and figuring this out too, so, so good. Well, I think we'll wrap this up. You call it doing that.
John Muir Laws:I, I am. Thank you so much for for your, your time today. Enjoy that. Batting these ideas around.
Danny Gregory:Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Whoops. Wrong. Thanks for joining us. And we will see you again.
John Muir Laws:Bye-bye.