Teaching is ART

I have a Diploma; it’s hanged on the most Southern wall of my house as required by Feng Shui. The Diploma says that I am a Master of Art in Teaching Science. At first I was laughing at it; how can a person be an artist and a scientist at the same time. It took me almost twenty years to understand and really feel it. The job that I am doing IS ART. It requires inspiration and can inspire. I think about how I can make it better all the time. Some ideas can come in my sleep. I deal with people and their emotions all the time. I can affect many lives. Yes, my job is ART.
Many of these conditions are true for science too, but science itself has no emotions, it deals with the world around more than with the people. People are affected only when the scientist discovered and explained something that would trigger the technology to move to the next level. In most cases the science affects all people in the same way. “Good” science brings more useful technology; “bad” science brings more harmful and destructive technologies. This is a traditional view, in reality there is no “good” or “bad” science they both at different stages of their development can bring us useful or destructive technologies, sometimes at the same time. For examples, batteries that are so good for the environment when new and working are extremely poisonous to the landfills when dead.
Art is like people it also is affected by technology not the other way around. Each artist has different effect on different people. One piece of art can turn your life around, the other you’ll pass without even noticing. And, of course, Art causes turmoil of emotions on both sides: the artist who creates it and the viewer who is affected by it. In reality it can be a viewer, a listener, an observer, a reader, a pupil.
I think I do understand it now. I am an artist who works with live human beings, not paint or ink. The result of my inspiration will affect many of my students. Without an inspiration I will not touch them at all. If I allow my sadness, or anger, or hate control my teaching I can affect those young lives in a negative way like nobody else. No parents or friends can affect those lives as I can.
I must be kind and forgiving to teach these qualities by example. I must be understanding and caring to be able to help them grow. I also must treat each of them as an individual, recognize and respect their differences even when the state requires them to pass the same test. Each of them has different needs in order to pass the same test. My art is to find this little something that will help this one student learn what he or she needs to learn and pass this next exam, sometimes without them even noticing what I did for them. And then I have to repeat the process of the search with each next student in each next class.
Of course, there are tricks and strategies that work with more than one student. This is why it is possible to teach how to be an artist. There are rules of perspective and the color wheel. But like any other art teaching can give you this moment of inspiration when you know that you created a masterpiece, when all little parts fell in place, and you affected this person life forever, and he or she will be a happier human being from this moment on. Like I remember I became a happier person when I first saw how the fishes in the Matisse’s aquarium started to move;or when the pink sand on Gauguin’s Hawaiian beach turned alive and vibrant.