An Interview With
Tamara Grayson
Continued from page 2
and enjoy it very much for the discipline it
gives me and also for the benefits of my health.
I also have sometimes a little bit of an itch to
paint on my own, and I’m starting to work with
that a bit. But after I work with it all day, when
I get home, sometimes I don’t even want to look
at a paintbrush, I would like a little bit more
time for my own pursuits. I think I still see
myself teaching many years because I enjoy it so
much. I’m one of those people that were very
fortunate in that the change I made was one that
really fit in with my philosophy of life. I think
the creative impulse is what we need to do more
instead of the destructive impulse and within
the art context I’m able to teach a lot of things
about respect for different view points, the
energy of life that connects us all, the attitude of
the beauty of the world and how we ought to
celebrate it, and I can do that very easily in the
context of what I teach. So it’s not just the
courses that I teach, it's an attitude and an
overall feeling of who I am and what I’m about.
It’s made it very congruent for me to be able to
teach in this area, where there’s so much
natural beauty about us in the mountains, and
that there’s such an appreciation for grass roots,
but it’s also been a privilege to try to educate
people to other ideas of art and what art can be
and that it can be abstract and it can be realistic.
There is no one right answer, and I think that’s
the beauty of art, that there can be 500 different
solutions to a problem and they’re all correct.
The most exciting thing about my job is how
much I have learned. I’ve learned more from
my students than I’ve ever learned from any
courses I have taken, because I can give them an
assignment or a problem and they’ll solve it in
ways I’ve never anticipated and that fills my
mind with new solutions and new ideas that
then I can apply to the next time that a student
has a problem, and that’s very exciting.
SS: So what you’re talking about mostly here is
the hands-on, not the art appreciation course of
looking at slides and stuff, so it must be awfully
hard to test people that are learning to draw
from those that have had previous
experience.
TG: The way I grade is more by process instead
of product. It almost had to be because you’ll
have a person that has achieved a huge
understanding of working with the media or is
able to represent subject matter and yet they
may still not be drawing technically as
beautifully as someone who has a natural gift. I
get more excited about the student that does not
think they can draw or paint. I think that
showing them that they do have the dexterity
and the ability to perceive and to draw is a very
exciting process and it reawakens the
excitement I first felt when I went through those
stages. It’s like reliving it and giving that joy to
someone else. So when I grade, it’s more on
what has this person learned; how they’ve
solved these problems they’ve created for
themselves, how they’ve learned the media,
how they’ve understood the concepts that I’ve
tried to teach them, how they’ve mastered the
ability to manipulate the media to get the
special effects they need.
SS: Great, I wish everyone would grade that
way.
TG: I am an existentialist in my philosophy of
education and that comes through in my grading
and teaching because I believe more in a
student- centered process rather than finished
products of art. Sometimes there is not a
tangible or specific way to nail down particular
points or answers. It’s a gray area. It’s an area
that involves intuition and subjective decisions.
SS: That’s a lot of stuff.
TG: Yeah - that is a lot of stuff. You can take
it and purify it...
SS: Why can’t I just quote ...
TG: Well, you can quote...
SS: You just pretty much wrote your own
interview.
TG: Well, I get going and ...
SS: I love it. It’s so passionate and you don’t
always find that in instructors after so many
years.
TG: I’ve been teaching for 25 years, and I think
that I love it now more than I ever have.
SS: How wonderful.
TG: I really love it. If I get jaded, aggravated,
or pessimistic, it’s with the paperwork, not with
the teaching aspects of the job.
SS: Anything else?
TG: I think the beauty of teaching at Wilkes
Dec^beril997;
is the freedom that teachers have to set the
format for what they’re teaching and explore
the subject matter for wliat they’re teaching in
any maimer that they wish. I think that’s a great
strength and because we have that multitude of
approaches and of attitudes about the subject
matter, it all creates a great texture in the fabric
of our program.
UPDATE
By Tony Smith
The Wilkes Community College volleyball
team fmished the season with a bang collecting
their third straight tournament championship.
On November 7th the Cougars played fourteen
games during five matches before winning it
all.
The Cougars started out against Caldwell
before moving on to the regular season
champions Forsyth Tech. After losing the
second match, the Cougars had to replay
Caldwell in order to advance to the finals. It
was a long match but Wilkes held on to win
only to have to meet Forsyth Tech in the finals
- and in order to win, the Cougars would have
to win two matches in a row. Behind the
inspirational play of Tournament MVP Chad
Hayes, the Cougars stepped up their attack and
came from behind to win both matches and take
home the gold.
To finish off the season, several players
received awards for the season as follows:
Most Improved - Davina Williams
Most Spirited - Allison Wayne
Most Valuable Player - Christy Riddle
Coach Smith would also like to thank the never-
ending support of two former players and
assistant coaches, Scotty Lambert and Richard
Fink.