I'm not going to talk about the attack today. I can't write fast enough anyways. By the time I upload this damned thing, there's some new piece of information rendering it moot.
Last night,I left depressed and frustrated by my Design and Appreciation class.
We put all our projects on the wall for critiques. I saw stuff a lot better than mine. This distressed me. I thought it was good, but next to other folks' stuff, it was sheer crap. Making matters worse, my teacher barely uttered a word about it. She asked all the other students questions about their work, but pretty much said nothing about mine. This upset and frustrated me. You know, I would rather a teacher that is too critical than one that says nothing. Who do they think they're fooling? They aren't sparing your feelings. You know they think your work isn't worth commenting on. But they also don't help you one bit. Is the point of a critique to get a little pat on the back? Why bother having one if the teacher isn't going to give helpful suggestions? I even had her look at my next assignment when I was working on it in class, but she had very little to say. All I really got was "play with this a bit more". You know, if I wanted to hear some vague rules without feedback, I would have bought a book. I took a class for the interaction. And I kind of resent the fact that I'm not getting it, especially when it's so obvious that I'm struggling.
In my Flash class, there's a lot of people who are much better designers than I am. I know that organizing my ideas and my creativity in a design format is tough for me. Ask me to create characters and animate them, and I can do it just fine. Ask me to paint an emotionally expressive picture with acrylic and canvas, and I can make some very compelling work. But ask me to structure something basic, using tried and true design techniques and I'm just stumped. Rob tells me it's repetition, that I'm not accustomed to doing that, and maybe he's right. But I still sometimes feel a bit lost in this area and wonder if maybe it isn't more innate for some people than others.
I rest in the comfort that I bypassed a lot of pre requisites for this course, and that a lot of folks have had more experience than me. Hell, some of them are professional designers. But still, it kind of sticks in my craw that I can't just whip out the great designs. I know the tools really well. I can do some great animations but ask me to do something a client might like, and I'm fucked.
At least my teacher is good. All of the teachers at Valley seem to be a bit tentative about critiques, compared to what I've seen elsewhere. However, Linda has been helpful when I'm stuck. If I come to her and ask, "how can I make this better?" She has a lot of helpful suggestions. She's really good about giving feedback to make the work better while still respecting your creativity.
my graphic design teacher, Arleigh, has some helpful suggestions, too. She's actually exceptionally good at pushing her students to do the best they can, and gives a lot of helpful suggestions. She spends a lot of time coming around to students, giving them advice and direction. That helps a lot and is making her my favorite teacher this semester. So at least I have a couple of good classes.
But I am stuck with this depressing and frustrating feeling that I don't have the talent, if I did I wouldn't have to do it repetetively and be constantly instructed and directed on it.
My Dad always tells me a story about my sister, Emily. He says that a dance teacher of hers once said "When I first met Emily, out of four students, she was number five. Now she's number one."
I guess that should be encouraging to me, and at times it is, but there's also the matter that my sister is eightteen, whereas I'm thirty. I've had a lot longer to get good and I haven't, and that's really discouraging to me. It seems that I should be a lot better than I am. A lot of times, I just leave class feeling like some talentless hack.
I'm depressed.