Reflection on own strategies for:
1) Motivating and instilling passion – To get motivated I usually require some kind of deadline to get me started. Sometimes they are deadlines set by myself and sometimes they are course deadlines, etc. Once I get started and have warmed up my eyes by looking at new and inspiring visuals, passion to work and create comes easy!
2) Cultivating sustained attention – To be able to work for sustained periods, requires me to be in my studio space as described in an earlier post. Anything outside of those parameters won’t enable me to find my focused/unfocused rhythm.
3) Combating frustration – I’ve found that stepping back, or taking a break, is the best way for me to combat frustration. Often, I will leave the work for a day and come back to it with fresh eyes and a new perspective. I usually find that whatever was frustrating me about the work isn’t as important or overwhelming as I was thinking at the time.
4) Working hard to meet a deadline – The biggest distraction I have when a deadline is approaching are my family and friends. This is one of the times I have to shut the door (physically and metaphorically) on the outside world. Deadlines usually create a form of frustration that will require several mini-breaks. My family and friends will often see a break as time that I’m not working, however I’m still mentally working.
5) Delayed gratification – As I like to be spontaneous at times with artmaking, not necessarily knowing the endpoint is not frustrating or scary. I can always pause during a piece and experiment to work through ideas.
Strategies applied to the classroom:
1) Motivating and instilling passion – The undergrads I teach are experts at procrastination and poor time management and I have tried many approaches to motivate. Sometimes I’ve created tight deadlines and other times I’ve deducted points for not making consistent use of time set aside to work. I’m having difficulty getting the engineering students to understand the importance of process. I’m getting some good ideas from what we’re doing now and think that I may need to require set progress updates (other than informally meeting with them during class) and maybe even an “experimentation” week where they formally work through one of their identified challenges.
2) Cultivating sustained attention – The students develop work station habits that help them concentrate in the lab and I’ve also found that the students will often help get each other back on task by giving each other feedback about their work and talking each other through problems they are experiencing.
3) Combating frustration – A strange trick that I’ve found to help frustrated students to “reset” their brains if they get frustrated with using the computer (our media) is to have them save their work and restart the machine. There is seldom any technical reason to do so, but the pause while the machine restarts, logging on to a fresh desktop, and reopening the software program seems to be like giving them fresh air! And if the software was the source of the frustration, it usually clears up after a restart anyway.
4) Working hard to meet a deadline – Like the teachers in the Hetland text, our lab is open outside of class time. The students understand that they may need to come in outside of class to complete an assignment. As I have a mixed group with varying skills and experience with video editing, I find that having additional times to work allows those with less experience opportunities to experiment with the media without the fear that they may run out of time.
5) Delayed gratification – Most of the work assigned to my students involves them to pre-plan and script out their project before they even pick up a camera, so there are not really any times that they don’t know their endpoint.
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