----- Original Message ----- From: "Shyrell Melara" : BTW - For those of you who do teach, do ALL of you have degrees and such? I have a degree in photography and would like to teach children. I've been toying with the idea of a summer program. But where and how would I start? I started many qualification courses but completed none, holding absolutely nought in the way of degrees or diplomas. This never stopped me from learning a lot while studying, rather, I was more interested in the knowledge than the paper at the end. Amusingly as an insider teaching and lecturing I've seen priorities change (funding, obligations, budgets etc) to the point that I had serious concerns about the diplomas and the like that have been issued to people.. How to put it... once we could fail those who learned little, failed to apply themselves or were inherently incapable of demonstrating they understood what they needed to understand. Now as funding is based on the numbers of students that pass rather than the number who enter a course there is a reluctance to fail anyone. Course requirements and material has been relaxed to ensure a higher pass rate - and there are people entering courses with their highest priority being to obtain qualifications rather than to learn. I have seen some highly qualified lecturers (not specifically in photography) who are incapable of actually conveying information, who barely have a grasp of the subject they teach while conversely I have met some enthusiastic unqualified lecturers who deliver a mass of information succinctly and effectively. I guess I view a qualification for what it is - a sort of 'letter of introduction' for the holder to the outside world, with that letters value being based on the known standards of the institute which issued it. Say for example a UWA chemistry degree, great, a mail order degree from some offshore 'institute' valued very low ;) My lack of qualifications never seemed to matter, I still got some great jobs with no paperwork as I was a 'known'. I've taught courses in Photoshop both to graphic designers and to photographers - I love the tool as a graphics program, it works extraordinarily well! For photographers though I felt it was lacking and never felt at ease teaching it as though it were the be-all and end-all of tools. The course unfortunately was restricted to Photoshop only and demanded nothing more be taught so I withdrew from teaching. Later I worked for a company which offered Photoshop courses and tutorials but again I declined to teach it to people and instead concentrated on teaching them how to use other programs - the other guy who lectured was great and those new to photography seemed to enjoy the courses and benefited from the networking. Many of the pro photographers were pretty experienced at Photoshop anyway, but as working pros they were searching for faster ways to chew through their work and keep time in front of computers to a minimum. Those I taught were delighted with being able to use free programs, many discovering they barely had to look at the images as the programs did their tricks - some found they need only do a rapid evaluation of the images to decide which were keepers, maybe do a quick crop then farm the rest of the work out to batch processing programs. Sometimes a bunch of photos would quickly be dropped into Photoshop for special actions or masking, but the time spent there was kept to a minimum. Since Perth is a small city with waaay too many photographers for the market, the pricing is critical to business success here.. that's a euphemism for 'ya gotta be cheap'. No photographer has the time to spend an hour on an image, even 15 minutes is excessive if you're to keep the business economically viable, so trimming the workload to the bone is critical! Do a school function one night, cover a sporting event the next day and finish off the evening with a wedding and they'd have a couple of thousand images to work - batching the bulk of it is the only way to make the business pay. How to get into teaching? Write up a course that you know will interest people, market it - take it friends, family and the like and get as many people interested as possible then head down to the local college and sell it to them. Say you have people ready to enrol, tell them what you need in the way of facilities, work out what you'll take in pay and decide if it's still what you want to do. If the college sees they'll get a return, then you're in. As the course runs, continue marketing it and see if the college runs teacher training courses at a reduced cost for staff (some do for free), if so, do them and pick up whatever teacher qualifications you can. You'll probably be offered relief work as permanent staff take days off sick or whatever - do these days. Always make yourself available. In time you may be offered permanent work, or a permanent position may come up - apply for it. In the meantime keep running your own courses, keep them pretty cheap and now that you're established in the college, attend photo club meets and offer to do free talks, go to local schools and offer assistance to teachers .. spread your self far and wide and be seen as THE face in your area for anything to do with the teaching of digital photography. Success is based on marketing these days - market yourself heavily and you'll get what you're after in the end. A word of advice though, if you find a quicker way to do something - pass it on and don't keep it to yourself, you are after all a teacher now - NEVER compromise this. If you found it then some one else will undoubtedly stumble across it too. If you hold anything back then you are cheating your students. If you want to be the best teacher you can be then keep your eyes open and look at everything and anything that could improve your knowledge and ease the work that students seek to undertake. Learn from your students, keep abreast of new technology, new programs, new tricks, new anything. Never bluff - if you don't know something or if you're confronted with something you've never heard of, ask or try to find out more, no one expects teachers to be infallible and few appreciate a person who dismisses things they don't understand of have never seen before. Even though you may not teach it, try to learn about data recovery, media validation, various freeware programs and the like (the freeware comes in handy when you have less wealthy students - they'll appreciate this!). You don't need to learn too much about the underlying technology if you're just training end users to make good images, but it will come in very handy when things go wrong. Encourage students to share THEIR discoveries with the classes - that is another way for you to learn about anything new too :) Finally - people are learning Photoshop because it is what they think they need. By all means teach it to those who want to know more about Photoshop, but be aware that it may not be what they need at all. Find out what people actually want .. often it is to create better images or to make their images look better. This need not specifically involve Photoshop and if people can be shown cheaper, easier ways to achieve this goal then they will thank you for saving them time and money, mostly time ;) I don't know if this coming across right, please don't take it as an anti-Photoshop rant.. what I'm trying to say among other things is that it should ultimately be about the final product and not so much about the process one goes through to achieve it. karl
