Our First Photography Class

Yizong is all excited about teaching photography. He came to me and asked me to help him put it together. We both selected pictures from our respective collections, both good and bad, to use as examples. We talked about what we would cover. Yizong wants to get into talking about the equipment so badly he can taste it, but I insisted that we teach the basics first. Things like what makes a good picture and why. He came around quickly, and we put together our topics.

Putting together the class, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as easy as planning it. I had no idea who the target audience really was. At first I thought it was only the youth group. Yizong said that it was for the entire church. Either way the material would be the same, so I got myself into a place where I could talk in front of either kids or adults. Our first date fizzled because of weather. Our second date, our first class, fizzled due to participation.

Maybe fizzled isn't the right word, but it sure did seem like it to me. Of all the hype that I thought was surrounding the class, only three people showed up. I couldn't really tell if any of them wanted to be there, however. Two of the kids are boyfriend/girlfriend, and they only want to be with each other. That we were having a photography class was a tertiary consideration for them. The other kid that showed is an artistically inclined type, but he really didn't say much of anything until the last few slides.

Slides... it seems we do everything with slides now. Powerpoint, or in this case, Keynote (Apple's answer to Powerpoint). And the class itself... Yizong started off like a college professor. He did all the talking, presented all the facts, and had an entirely one-way dialog with his "students." It did not go well. I've done that in classes I have taught before, and it never works out well, especially if the kids don't want to be there. He made it through the first topic: simplicity, but I had to have him go back through the slides and get the kids involved.

Getting the kids involved is the hardest part of the class. The material is ok, better if it's interesting, but useless if the students don't care. In this case I made him go back through his slides, and I started asking the kids questions. Things like, how does this picture make you feel? What do you like about this picture? What don't you like? That last question got us in trouble. One of the three kids is black, and he stated as his first dislike, "There aren't any black people." He was right, there were no pictures of black people in our slides, but neither of us wanted the class to degenerate into a racial discussion. Fortunately he didn't press the point, and we went forward, but we had to actively involve the kids. At times it was like pulling teeth to get them to make any comments on the pictures or the principles.

We held their attention for about 35-40 minutes, then our couple started texting, taking pictures of themselves, and doting on each other. Our artistic kid made a few comments about principles that we hadn't covered that apply to photography, but are more commonly talked about in other areas like drawing. After that 40 minutes, it was useless to continue, but we had reached the end of our slides. Somehow we had no concluding slides to summarize, but I doubt they would have made any impact.

That's really what I wonder at this point: did that class have any impact at all? Did the kids care? It seemed to me like they didn't. The few kids that did show interest didn't come, and it felt to me like we were wasting our time. No adults showed up. I'm not sure how this class was pitched either in the announcements or the newsletter, but I felt like it had been limited to the youth.

Should we continue? I'm on the fence. Part of me feels like we need to reteach the first part again to a larger audience to drum up support, but I'm not sure how practical that is at this point. There's more to write about this youth group, but I want to cover that in a post just for them. This post is about photography, and it's done. The question is: is our class done as well?