The reason for this is likely quite simple: he is unyielding passionate about the subject. His enthusiasm is so strong that even as a night course, taught between the hours of 6:00 pm and 10:00 pm, no one is ever tired. But it goes further than that. There are consistent obvious examples of his attempting to make the class succeed.
There is also another very important aspect of his class. The fact that is it "his" class. He developed the curriculum, the handouts, the assignments. He is in complete and utter control of the class. And his character come through into the class. Thinking back on prior courses, I suspect that some of my favorites have been my favorites for this same reason. When a course is actually a teacher's course, and not simply the curriculum that has been handed down from a higher level, or passed on from a previous teacher, there is something new, fresh and entirely ire-producible that exists. The examples I can think of of hand are "Theory of Knowledge" with Mr. Kelly in high school, my "3d Modeling for Rapid Prototyping" at ACAD and my "Animation I" course at ACAD. Maybe I will remember more later.
To top it off there was even cake tonight. But moving on to the actual topic of discussion.
I am building a metal ball and socket stop motion animation armature. It is the thing inside the puppets in films such as the Nightmare Before Christmas. It is the gold standard when it comes to what you put inside puppets. It doesn't wear out easily. It is really sturdy. It is smooth.
The main downside is that they are fairly complicated and difficult to build. For that reason I was the only one in the class to actually decide to build one. Once the opportunity arose there would have been simply no deterring me. I was going to go to the metal shop and build that armature.
So here we are are twenty hours of metal shop time later. I have my puppet built, after lots of trials and tribulations. The thing is holding together. Except I have doubts. Some of the solders that I have been doing have been breaking. Not that they are really weak, but they need to be really strong for their job.
But this project needs to get done, and I get it done, ready to show my class. Here is the armature before I go to my class.
All looks good. People are seeing it, and they are excited that I got this thing going.
But the fact is after class it looked like this.
This is because I had left my doubts about my armature unchecked. I had coddled it through the last few steps so that I wouldn't fail, instead of testing it is harshly as I should have.
It wasn't as though the teacher ripped this thing apart though. First one arm fell off halfway through class when I was messing with it. And then, at the end of class, I went over the armature one-on-one with the teacher. It felt like at that point I had been given permission to really test the armature. It is hard to describe, but once I had opened up about my doubts about the project, and the teacher was completely understanding, I could finally do was needed to be done and really try to tear the thing apart.
And then it really broke.
The thing is, after talking more, we discovered that it is likely a simple error I was making during the soldering process that was leading to all these weak joints. So tomorrow I will be able to fix it.
It is however, very interesting how visually and conceptually well this experience represents the greater world of creation (by which I mean art, design and pretty much anything). You need to have a very strong base structure to build everything else upon. You need to spend lots of time building it, and then actually test it. In this case a teacher provided a great means catalyzing this testing process.
It is incredibly important that I found and accepted the weakness of my armature now, instead of when it was too late, when the whole thing is covered in layers foam latex and it would actually, without exaggeration, ruin everything.
Whatever you are making, don't be scared to test it, because if you are scared to test it, it is all the more likely that it will break.
Kyler
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