🏛 When the student becomes the teacher

On the humbling discomfort of beginning again

Greetings from Maryland. We survived the gale-force winds and epic rain that should have been a proper January blizzard. The paper says we haven’t had a “normal” winter snow season since 2016. Maybe it’s nostalgia driving me to write about ice for this month’s Talking Back to Walden. Or solastalgia.¹

This post marks the one-year birthday of this Substack. Started the year from scratch, ended with 400 subscribers. I’m so grateful to have found this lovely community of writers and readers. Thank you, everyone, for your encouragement and support.

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“Most of us believe that teachers must know all. The wise Tao mentor knows that being aware of what is not known is important in order to begin to learn.”²

Diagrams and models: the tools of architecture’s vocabulary and grammar

I had a grad student not too long ago who wasn’t catching on. It led to a falling-out between us that I still think about, years later. The students in that course, Design Studio II, come from different backgrounds and professions. They’ve turned their lives upside-down to become architects, giving up a career as a political scientist or engineer, a real estate agent, graphic designer, or biologist. I once had a veterinarian with his own practice. When I asked him how he decided to give all that up to start over as an architecture student, he said he loves the animals, it’s the owners he can’t stand. I thought (but didn’t say), Honey, wait till you meet clients.

Starting over is exciting and excruciating. Humbling. During my Fiction MFA program, I was teaching this same design studio and had the realization: my students are about as advanced in architecture (which is to say, not) as I am in fiction writing. And here I’d been hoping that years in a creative field could somehow vault me ahead. But of course, it doesn’t work that way. Improvement takes time and diligence; there are no shortcuts.³

My goal for my students in Design Studio II is modest but demanding. They need to improve their spatial thinking skills. Working with structure and space is the foundation of all architectural design. We use spatial drawings to communicate abstract ideas to others. The semester includes visualizing space by studying precedents; representing spatial ideas with drawings, diagrams and physical models; reading theory about spatial thinking; and iterating their ideas many times over.

I emphasize that design is a patient search, that their first ideas can always be improved upon. I encourage them to imitate, adapt, and transform precedent, to absorb the DNA of great work. Their own unique ideas will only be legible once they’ve learned basic vocabulary and grammar. Learning by imitation: it’s what we do as humans, no matter the medium. Language, music, art, literature, dance, acting. Architecture is no exception.⁴

The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. is one museum with a copyist program for artists

Leaving a successful career to begin again is rough psychological terrain. It’s not unusual for some students, especially those with a literary or philosophical background, to be slow to spatial thinking and representation. No shame; it’s a learned skill that takes time and practice. When I advised a couple of students one spring semester to consider taking an additional design studio in the summer for their benefit, one of them took the suggestion as a personal affront. How dare I suggest they need remedial work, when it’s my job to teach them, now? We managed to reach a détente and finish the semester, but they never trusted me again.

In the end, their course evaluation was searingly negative and personal, the worst by far that I’ve ever received. They said I was unfairly favoring some students over others. That I was incompetent, expecting another professor to do the job that I couldn’t. That I made them feel unwelcome. I was tempted to write it off as projection of their own doubts about the wisdom of choosing architecture school. Or maybe they had a chip on their shoulder, and I was their scapegoat for all things wrong with our culture.

This can seem frustratingly subjective. Some architecture students are better able, innately, to grasp these lessons. That doesn’t mean others shouldn’t continue. There’s time for skills and talents to emerge, during grad school and out in practice. This student had been in architecture for all of four months, but given feedback by an experienced professor they chose to push back with You’re wrong about me.

Students learn to think draw abstract concepts to advance their projects

After many years at this, I know what students need to learn at this level and whether they are bringing the goods. I can recognize where a student is, relative to past and current peers, and benchmark where they are to guide them forward. It’s natural for a student to fall back on what they know, but especially at the early stages, if they focus on verbal descriptions of ideas but fail to produce visual representations of those ideas, they are missing out.

Writers say the work must be on the page. Architects say it must be on the wall. Ideas are cheap if they can’t be represented with an architectural vocabulary of structure and space. Spatial drawings and diagrams are the tools, not fancy banter. Images, not words. Otherwise, it’s nothing but “talkitecture.”

When a student feels invalidated by criticism or believes their identity is threatened by pointed feedback, they can’t learn. Creativity shuts down. Fight/flight smothers creativity. All I can do is reassure them that others have been in the same situation and to trust the process. But this student didn’t trust me or the process. They were certain that I didn’t appreciate their unique genius. That I didn’t see them.

My own architecture school experience was a weeding-out. On our first day, all one hundred of us sat in the auditorium, excited and nervous. We were told to look around, that half of us would be gone by graduation. Now, our students are more like customers, with expectations to be satisfied. It’s our job to get them through, to equip them to succeed. So when a student feels unvalued, unseen, unwelcome, I’m left asking: what could I have done differently?

You can’t learn from someone you don’t trust. I’m disappointed in myself that I couldn’t repair that trust, that I didn’t reach that student during the months I had with them. I failed to teach them what they needed to learn.

It’s humbling to be reminded that mentoring is a mirror, a two-way street. As much as I want my student to learn, I recognize that this is my lesson. In the Taoist spirit that this student is my teacher, I can ask, What is my lesson here?

Where do I lack confidence? Where is my expertise lacking? Where do I feel unwelcome?

Simply asking these questions eases my mind. It increases my compassion for this student and for myself. I hate feeling like an outsider, and I hate that I contributed to them feeling that way.

“It matters not what we try to think or carry out; what matters is that once we begin we must never lose heart until the task is completed.”⁵

It’s not unusual for students to approach education as their chance to prove themselves, to shine and show off what they know. I’m not immune from this culturally installed mindset, but it gets in the way. The drive to stand out clouds curiosity. Over-identifying with prior expertise hinders learning something novel.

As I prepare for the upcoming semester of Design Studio II, I’ll try to remember that I have as much to learn as my students. They’re paying a lot of tuition to learn from an expert, so I won’t burden them with my secret: I am as empty a vessel as they are.

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Since this post was published, we began donating 30% of paid subscriptions to a different worthy environmental cause each season. So far, paid subscriptions have supported the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Old Growth Forest Network, and the Center for Humans and Nature. Track past and current recipients here.

PS. Rereading this on the eve of Homecoming’s second anniversary, I’ve made the rash decision to republish it with an update. I was given another chance to work with this same student last fall semester, and I now see that writing this changed me in ways I’m still not quite grasping. Writing always helps tease out insight, so we’ll see.

1. Poignant word coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2005 for "the homesickness you have when you are still at home" and your home environment is changing in ways you find distressing, according to Wikipedia.

2. Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch, Mentoring: The TAO of Giving and Receiving Wisdom, p.29.

3. They say architecture is an old man’s profession, in that it requires decades of practice to do your best work. I can honestly say, after trying both, that writing is harder.

4. I have a soft spot for the age-old practice of copying the “old masters” in art galleries, such as the National Gallery in D.C. Here’s an article about other programs.

5. Chungliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch, Mentoring: The TAO of Giving and Receiving Wisdom, p.73.