Greetings Citizens. Yesterday I spent the morning helping the basic students print the "portraits" from the EI Test. Nothing to help inspire students to make quality negatives than to have them try and make some prints from some crappy ones! I remember having to do that at The Maine Photographic Workshops and learning my lesson: nothing makes life easier in the darkroom than starting with a good negative!

The advanced students were working on VDB's. They are expected to turn a handful of them in today. Chucky has figured out the digital negatives pretty well. Better than anyone, myself included. One thing that is bothering me is that the students aren't shooting new work. They continue to work with their old negatives made for silver prints. The results aren't pretty. So, I think I'll have the kids shoot film over the weekend. I also want them to re-visit cyanotypes... make some "normal" ones and some over-exposed ones for cyan-o-dykes.

I received my evaluations from PCC in the campus mail yesterday. It was a melancholy experience reading them. It's surprising to me, sometimes, to see how much of an affect a teacher can have on a student's life. Of course there were evaluations that said I was too hard, that the Zone System is stupid and that I played favorites. But the other ones... the ones that made me cry... spoke to how I hadn't given up on the student when they had given up on themselves, how the class was hard but they learned more about Photography (and themselves) than they ever thought possible, and that I helped them find their "passion"! Those kind of comments keep me moving forward as a teacher and keep me less concerned about my work as an artist. Tissue, please.