I am looking forward to my 6th year of teaching photography and multimedia studies at the Arts Academy in the Woods. I have a B.A. in Arts and Aesthetics from Simon’s Rock of Bard College in Massachusetts (1984). After graduation, I worked in military intelligence as a Soviet Analyst and Russian Linguist, and as a counterintelligence analyst, before heading a small design team for a defense contractor. While working for the army, I was active in an artists’ cooperative, and taught after-school art classes for the Ann Arbor Public Schools. I have shown work in charcoal, oils, mixed media, fiberglass, and ceramics, and have exhibited digital images in London and Thailand. I am also a contributing artist to “Photoshop Secrets of the Pros: 20 Top Artists and Designers Face Off.” My teaching objectives reflect a balance between teaching from a fine arts perspective, and teaching skills necessary for success in the corporate world of design.
I want to take some time to describe the arts education I received as a teenager, since that heavily influences how I run my classroom. The college I went to was founded on the idea that students do not need to be 18 or 19 to undertake college level work. (I was 16 when I entered, which is the average age of freshmen there, and 19 when I earned my BA.) At Simon’s Rock, teachers and students consider each other colleagues with specific roles to perform. As a reflection of this, we called our professors by their first names, teachers and students jointly drove the curriculum, and although we were 16, we were treated as adults. However, we also understood that addition guidance was sometimes needed to help teens develop the self-discipline to be successful in a more collegiate environment.
Having spent what I consider my “formative years” in that environment, I am convinced it is preferable to more traditional authoritarian classrooms. If a student is having a problem, I prefer to find out the cause of it and address that, rather than punish or yell until their attitude improves. With that in mind, I am asking for your help in keeping the lines of communication open. If you know that your student is not satisfied with my class, encourage them to talk to me, and please feel free to contact me directly.
The most convenient method of communication for me is through email. If you prefer to speak to me directly, you can call and leave a message (the office doesn’t put through calls while we are in the classroom), and either we can talk on the phone or we can set up an appointment to meet. If you have email access, I’d appreciate a short email from you now (sent to manteyr@yahoo.com), with your child’s name in the subject line, and if there are any issues I should know about please feel free to include those at this time – otherwise, just a short note introducing yourself is great. Having an email from you in my files makes is easy for me to keep in touch with you.
We will be setting up student blogs this year for my classes, so that you have a way to review your child’s work, and required assignments. These will be linked from here, as they are created.
If you don’t have internet access, that is not a problem. My budget doesn’t allow students to print their work (except as needed for exhibitions), but we can set up a time to review their work in my room periodically.
On a personal note, I have a 20 year old daughter who was in the first graduating class at AAW. She has just completed a natural building apprenticeship, and is returning to her junior year at Marlboro College in Vermont, where she is studying urban planning.
I look forward to working with all of you and your students in the coming year.
Audrey
