I had an amazingly awful experience with a pottery throwing class with the City of Tempe. I'm normally someone who goes out of their way to give positive reviews, not negative ones. However, I just want potential students to be fully aware of what they are getting into. No matter what, the arts center will not offer a credit or refund. That is their policy.
However, when there are factual & valid reasons to make exceptions to rules, they should be facilitated. I recently signed up for a pottery intro to throwing class, which was just a waste of time and money. I don't say that lightly.
The instruction in the very first class was the teacher giving a dissertation on instructions for the majority of the class, and then asking the brand new students to create a bowl. For anyone who has ever taken a throwing class, there is a lot of instruction on how to make a bowl (let alone for students who have never even been at a wheel before, or used any pottery making techniques).
Then, the students were just told to make the bowls. It was entirely too much information at once. I don't know how anyone could remember all of that in the very first class and then be expected to make a bowl on their own. There were people in the class who had done pottery, prior to this class, who didn't suffer through that process. However, this was not an acceptable teaching process for beginners (which is what the class was categorized as). These steps should have been divided out and the students could then emulate those steps. These instructor could then move onto next steps with the students following those directions, etc. Even something useful to remind the students of the lengthy, complex steps that were communicated as they tried to act out these steps at the wheel would have been helpful. None of this was offered.
After expressing my concerns to the instructor several times, with no change in how the process was being taught, I actually just left at the beginning of the 2nd class. If I've ever felt like that emoji where the brain explodes, it was during rhis class.
I've taken many art classes at Mesa Arts Center, and I have never experienced an instructor throwing all of the steps at the beginning of a class where the students are just supposed to remember all of them. There weren't any step by step instructions written down. There weren't any visual aides. But, most importantly, the process should have been broken up, in steps so the students could actually remember them. Had that been the process, the students could apply those steps more fluidly and successfully.
That would have been extremely helpful throughout the process instead of just rushing through the instructions and leaving the students to try to remember the complicated & technical and, quite frankly, difficult processes that throwing entails. This is a difficult skill to learn, even with excellent teachers.
I approached the staff to explain that I was struggling with the instruction. I started with the instructor in the 2 different classes I attended. I spoke with a staff member when I left. She said she'd escalate to her manager who went out of town.
After the manager returned, I had to keep calling over and over again to get her to finally speak with me about the instruction and how I felt it failed the students. However, even after plenty of admission that the instructor didn't use things they have to help students (like infographics), that the instructor gave way too many instructions all at once and the students were lost with next steps, etc., they still wouldn't provide just a credit to a future class.
I didn't want the money back, although that would have been ideal. I would have been willing to be credited for a future class with an instructor who taught the class in such a way that the students were set up for success. I'm an incredibly good student. Just in the past year, I've learned how to paint, make jewelry, some woodworking, and I've learned to weld & plasma cut metal. So, I'm obviously capable of learning when given the proper instruction.
This class was a total fail for the City of Tempe in how it taught the class, how it handled the obstacles given to the students, and how they handled the final conversation. They even went so far as to tell me they hoped I signed up for a future class after admitting the teacher should have done things differently and no credit was offered. That felt a little like a slap in the face at the end of the call. I'm incredibly disappointed in the entire scenario. This is something I have always wanted to learn, and I should have went with my gut and taken it at Mesa Arts Center. The true lesson here is you get what you pay for (unless you sign up for a class at Tempe, because apparently i just threw that $160 away). read more
