Worst nightmare

ps200518 Worst nightmare: Exiguous teaching  

  I had the same awful dream

My worst nightmare is to fail as a teacher, and the nightmare I was having this morning was exactly that – a recurring nightmare I’ve had since I left the university. In the past I have described this dream before. I follows the same theme – I’m late for class, the students are surly, and the building is under remodeling.

What does it mean? That I’m a terrible teacher? I dismiss this by remembering some students who – even recently – said I was the best teacher they ever had in college.

Yet the dreams keep coming! The one I had this morning was so bad it made me reconsider all that I’m doing now. In the onset of the global pandemic and economic meltdown facing the world, American students are frozen in place like some horrible sci-fi movie.

In the moments after I wakened from this nightmare, I questioned the notion of making printing plates in the manner we’re accustomed to. The etching grounds made of Asphaltum, the powdered rosin for aquatint and all the rest seem so foolish.

Would it be better to use the silitransfer method I’ve been using for the past ten years? In a way, yes.

Would it be better to use a combination of laser engraving and non-metal plates? In some ways, yes.

In the end, however, it’s better to ask, why make plates at all? I think of the Proximates principle – that it’s better to expand on the geosocial aspect of making and exchanging prints than make prints for pleasure and profit.

It’s better to develop entertainment skills – thinking neither of the wholly practical and rational nor of the wholly delusional and impractical but somewhere in between. Better to vacillate than remain in the old world that is dying.

If I could control my nightmare, I would speak out to the students. “Go out and work in the garden for the same time duration as they labor over drawing lines in a hard ground on a copper plate.” With growing things, communing with the Natural order of things, one may hope of surviving the end of the old world when printmaking was mere self-gratification.

By exchanging prints with a kid in Africa, for example, my friends the Hartman family is can give their kid hope – him watching the mail delivery for a letter from Africa with a print inside, part of the game of Proximates. If the mail delivery system functions it will be by people who have eaten. If not by real, physical, energy-wasting and air-polluting deliver, then perhaps the internet.

Why the exiguous teaching?

To be parsimonious or petty gave exiguous its present sense of inadequacy in education. As a subscriber to the Merriam Webster “word of the day” service, this word came when I was thinking about my inadequacy as a teacher in the higher education system which I entered in the 1960’s - a time of exiguousness in teaching at all levels.