The white bunny

When I first started my training to become an art teacher, as part of the course we had to attend lessons at the university half the days of the week and we were placed at a school the other half of the days. The theoretical lessons and discussions at the university were meant to be complementary, supportive and enhancing of our teaching experience at our placement schools. They included, amongst a plethora of other subjects, practical tips about coping with challenging behaviour, insightful articles into child psychology, marking exercises and mock exams, information on the latest research findings on education, art exercises and staging lessons and presentations with our piers and so on and so forth. Although these lessons, discussions and lectures were of the highest standard and although I believe they were genuinely intended to support and prepare the trainee art teachers, there could not have been a deeper gap between theory and practice; the days at the placement schools could not have felt any more distant, detached and disconnected from the course theory, unless the schools were placed on the moon.

The course tried to place each trainee teacher in two different schools within the one academic year (if full-time) that the course lasted. They tried to pick two schools that were as different from each other as possible, so that the trainee teachers got a glimpse of how diverse the environment, the teaching methods, the students and the teachers could be. No one could have prepared me personally for the first month in my first school placement. I was very excited at the prospect of trying out my art projects, which we were all able to build and create from scratch, based on the current -at the time- curriculum and we were going to deliver our art projects under the watchful eye of the art teachers. Before any of that though, there was a period of about two weeks where we just followed the art teachers around the school, observing their lessons and taking valuable notes.

My first placement was in an inner London secondary school and from the first day there I was totally horrified and deeply shocked at the way the students behaved. Originally I thought that I had just observed a particularly "challenging" class, but when the scenario more or less repeated itself in class after class and day after day (with notable and memorable few exceptions), I just knew that the next months were not going to be anywhere near what I had expected and hoped for. Taking aside incidents including guns, knives and an assault on a support worker, the presence of the police in the school and terrifying hourly stampedes on the stairs, the atmosphere in the classrooms and the interaction amongst students themselves and between teachers and students, were so unsuited to a school environment, so far from anything I had ever experienced or could imagine, that I felt at a complete loss of how and what I could ever offer and get out from the experience I was letting myself into.

Despite all that, I was quite confident in the projects I had designed for the students, I thought they were imaginative and could be educational and also fun and I had put measures in place so that I could adapt and expand them easily according to the students' specific abilities. I had also picked up some tips from the university lessons on teaching, such as to try and learn and remember the students' names as early as possible, to try and always address different students in a class and not only focus on a few memorable characters, to always label the action and never the person (so that a student's action is silly for example, but never the student), to always carry through on a threat or punishment, to establish an effective and carefully thought out seating plan for each class, to be fair and pleasant, but apparently not to smile for the first term. And also to dress in a smart, contemporary way, never wear old fashioned clothes or clothes of any extreme fashion. I was secretly a bit excited to try all these things out and see what worked and what did not.

My worse class was on Wednesdays. The class's art teacher was from the beginning very hostile towards me, for no apparent reason. She was not supportive at all and several times undermined me and ridiculed me in front of her students. The students were out of control in her class, there was a lot of screaming, throwing items and running around, everyone shouted at the same time, the books and equipment were all damaged, the language used was foul and there was no beginning, middle or end to the lessons. I never had a chance to properly introduce my projects, I tried to several times, but was unable to get everyone to be quiet and listen to what I was saying. The art teacher always cut in, interrupted, interfered, asserted herself in a wailing voice and more or less pushed me aside and pushed her way around the classroom, banging her palm on the tables and distributing photocopied handouts with colour-in shapes. I found this lesson on Wednesdays so traumatic and all consuming in a negative way, that the night before I was unable to sleep, I had horrible nightmares if I did manage to sleep and the morning always found me in a cold sweat and unwilling to go to school.

In a desperate attempt to establish myself as a teacher on the Wednesday class, I bought a pair of glasses, with no prescription lenses, but ones with a slight tint, which I wore and hoped they gave me an air of authority of some sort, while at the same time I was able to hide behind them and get some protection. I thought they worked for a little while, when one Wednesday the teacher said in front of the class while laughing and pointing at my face something like: "...obviously Miss here has no clue what she is talking about, don't listen to her, let me show you how to do it...". I just had a blank moment then, had no idea what to say or what to do, I did not know what I was doing in a foreign country, in some horrible teacher's lost class and when I went to rub my brow, my hands hit the glasses' frame and it felt so alien a contour that I really thought I had lost myself forever in the hell of that classroom.

During my time at that school, I took responsibility of giving one to one, after school tuition for A level in Art, to a girl who had entered the country as a refugee from Kosovo six months prior to me being placed at that school. The girl's English was very poor, she was very timid and under a witness protection scheme. She had a great work ethos and was absolutely determined to do well. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of that year, the girl spoke a little Greek and I think she felt very comfortable around me, because as the weeks passed she started joking and laughing more and more. She did pass her A level in Art with a B+ that year, but what this encounter made me realise, was that the main reason I was able to help her, was that I could related to her and understand her position fairly well. I could not however, sympathise and relate well at all with the majority of the students in this inner London school. For me their behaviour was unacceptable, rude, disrespectful  and unreasonable, but as it stands the majority of these students came from troubled backgrounds, were impoverished, neglected, abused and abandoned, so that any kind of behaviour from them was really a shouting cry for attention, structure and help. Even when I realised that looking at their files, it was still very hard for me to put myself in their shoes and I had not the tools, experience or understanding I needed in order to be able to deal with their behaviour and move passed it, so that I could do my job and try to teach them art. All the preparatory lessons at the university could not offer me what I needed, which was time and subsequently experience in that inner London school and I really believe that someone who had grown up in inner London, possibly in an environment similar to the one the majority of those students came from, would be far more suitable for the job and at a clear advantage. (Despite this straight path of logic, the art teacher of the Wednesday class was such a person from inner London and of a "troubled background", so clearly that alone is not enough either).

I have dwelled here a lot on the Wednesday class, which was the worst one I witnessed, however it is only fair to say that there were several other art teachers in that school, amongst whom a printer who had a wonderful way with even the most challenging students and in a firm, strict and very effective manner managed to deliver the most outstanding printing projects. I did try my best to study the way he handled the classes and the students and how structured, organised and at the same time flowing and effortless his lessons were. I took all that on board and thankfully had the opportunity to try out what I had learned on my second placement. My second placement could not have been any more different than the first; it was a small, selective public secondary school in outer North London (no fees were required to be paid by parents, but a very tough entry exam was in place).

I was in a way extremely lucky that I was placed in such a school the second time around and not at the beginning. Two trainee art teachers in that year were placed in a grammar, private or selective school first and in a large, inner London school the second time and they both ended up quitting the course before the end of the final term. The North London school was a pleasure to work in. The students were very keen to learn and were respectful of each other, of the teachers and of the school. They restored my faith in teaching and I was at last able to put most of my attention on delivering my projects and teaching them rather than constantly battling with behavioural issues. I did think a lot of the students and the situation at the inner London school while I worked at my second placement. Placing really bright students in one school was obviously going to make teaching a hell of a lot easier and more rewarding, but what was the solution for the inner London school, which hosted an overwhelming majority of "challenging" and "troubled" students? They clearly needed all the help and support they could get at that school, and although that was as plain as daylight to me, I am afraid to say that I was so deeply relieved not to be in that school any more, that I did not ponder on the matter any longer during that period.

At the second school, I became slowly more confident in the classroom and was soon able to try all my projects and design new ones. It took a while before I could relax enough during lessons, to be able to deliver a lesson in such a way, that I had the uninterrupted attention of most students for the majority of the time. But I was still on my guard in case I got suddenly a bout of behavioural issues similar to the ones I had witnessed in my first placement. This thankfully did not happen, but one day, after a lesson with year seven students, one of them approached me and asked to have a word with me. He said he did not want to bring it up during the lesson, but that the lesson I had just delivered to them was all wrong. The lesson was based on the colour wheel, and after going through the primary and secondary colours we had done a painting exercise using only primary colours. The student said that I was wrong and that the primary colours were not red, blue and yellow, but red, blue and green. He said the reason he was so sure about this fact was that his father had talked to him about it only the previous weekend. A more experienced teacher would have questioned a bit the student as to what his father's profession was or what they had talked about exactly regarding primary colours, but I did none of these, but in my newly found confidence shook my head and smiled, saying that the student must have misunderstood or got confused and that the primary colours were indeed, red, blue and yellow.

Forgetting totally about this incident I went about teaching and organising my paperwork for a week, when it was time again to give a lesson to the class this one student was in. This time the student was not so considerate towards me as to take me aside after class, but instead put his hand up and asked  permission to say something regarding our previous lesson at the beginning of the class. He said that since we were learning about colours and primary and secondary colours in particular, we should know that there is also a different set of primary and secondary colours, other than the ones I taught them in the previous lesson. This set of primary colours included red, blue and green and they were the primary colours of light. The secondary colours produced when those primary colours of light were mixed, were magenta, when blue was mixed with red, yellow, when green was mixed with red, and cyan, when green was mixed with blue. All the three primary colours of light mixed together would provide a white light. The student was so calm, articulate and confident in his speech, that I became progressively more and more dizzy and hot on the face as I listened to him and as stored and forgotten words from my own physics lessons at school flashed by, with white light being the most prominent memory. I thanked the student for the very interesting and enlighting contribution to our lesson and moved swiftly on as I had nothing to add or expand on this information; throughout that day my heart was pounding and I was drifting about in a smog of embarrassment and meagerness.

Although I believed the student on the theory of the primary colours of light and although I kind of remembered as much in fractions from my own schooling, I was still itching to read on these when I got home and actually understand what it was all about (something that clearly I should have done a week prior to that event, when the student first approached me). To begin with I found out that the reason both these sets of primary colours included three colours, had nothing to do with the properties of light, but with the human eye, which has typically three types of colour receptors, called cone cells. Each of these three types of cone cells responds to different ranges of the colour spectrum. So if we were goldfish, which have four types of cone cells, then our primary colours would have been four instead of three. Which were the three primary colours, was decided and disputed amongst scientists as they tried to pin down the three primary colour sensations that the human eye perceives. The human cone cells in fact do not correspond precisely to an exact set of primary colours and it is understood today that there are variations from individual to individual. Then there are two ways of defining these three primary colours: the additive way and the substractive way.

The way we mix colours in art, so mainly pigments, is a substractive way, because each time we mix a colour with another we substract or block some wavelengths of light. The primary colours we use typically in art therefore are the substractive primaries (red, yellow and blue-RYB). The primary colours my student was talking about, are the additive primaries (red, green and blue-RGB), which are basically colourful emmited lights mixed  to create more colours, typically used in television and computer displays (basically adding or mixing lights together). When all three basic additive colours are mixed together they produce a white (colour) light, while when the three substractive primaries are mixed together they produce a dark brown-black colour. After getting a basic understanding of all this, I had the idea of doing a small demonstration to the class the student with the primary colours of light  belonged, with a torch and some colour cellophane sheets. Although this would not have been part of the art curriculum, interdisciplinary teaching was highly advocated at the time, and I always thought that approaching a subject from a completely different starting point or perspective could give it a renewed understanding.

Anyway, I was quite pleased with myself for having the idea to follow through with this interesting information that my student had brought to light, and arrived at the school with my torch and cellophane sheets, in red, green and blue. At least I demonstrated the common sense to try this experiment before the lesson started, during the break, and I darkened the room as much as possible by drawing the curtains. When I shone the torch through each individual sheet a nice bit of colour flooded the surface of the wall. But when I put two sheets together on the torch, things did not happen as they should. The green and red sheets of cellophane did not create yellow, but a dark brown and when I put all three sheets of additive primary colours together there was definitely no white light, but instead a dark brown-black colour, just like it happened in painting. I stood there perplexed and annoyed, starting to sweat as the lesson was shortly to be started, when I realised that I was actually not mixing lights together at all. I needed one torch per cellophane sheet and I needed to be mixing the emitted lights of each upon the wall. What I was doing was still mixing colours in a substractive way, I was using the colourful cellophane sheets as pigments. Of course there were no more torches around, definitely not two more of them, so I never carried out the experiment in the class.

The funny thing about all this, is that even after I had worked in other schools in subsequent years, I still remembered the students from the school of my first placement the clearest. I am very curious to know if the situation at that school is still the same, and I often come up with ideas of projects in art that I think would have caught the attention of the students, as they were, of that school. The printer teacher who worked there, always had in his projects an element of magic, of something unpredictable and surprising happening towards the end of the projects, and the students always came back for more, secretly wanting to see how their work would turn out. I never tried the experiment with the colorful light since the fiasco of the one torch, so I thought it was high time I saw if the white light really did occur.

The white bunny