 I finished my master's at Syracuse University and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship through the Pew Charitable Trust and it was actually part of my degree, it's the Future Professoriate Program and they essentially picked grad students who looked as if they would make potential instructors and we did workshops, so it was like technology in the classroom, interactive peer learning was one of the topics and we did workshops for two years. One was we, there were about 35 of us, we'd go into a room and you'd pull a topic out of a hat and it was about this element of performative and interactive teaching style and that you should be able to teach anything. So we'd have a day, four hours to research a topic, go to the library, come back and teach it and it was definitely tough because you had to really think on your feet and it could be completely outside of your field, they didn't pick anything that was humanities based or anything. So you had to go off research and then come back and present your ideas and I think that was essentially the premise for it was that you can teach anything if you have the practical skills of getting students involved. Oh I think about that constantly and it's funny because I think students, you know they're media babies, the classroom has changed radically and so attention span has changed, students are much more complex and so how to get them inspired and how to encourage them to pursue their passion is a difficult task so every time I go into a classroom I know that there's a performative element to it, you have to have enthusiasm. There is this theatrical component that says you're on when you're in the classroom to draw people in and if you're not excited about what you're doing and you're not passionate about what you're doing and this is where I think peer learning is ultimately just implicit in all teaching then you'll lose them, you'll completely lose them. So if you don't have the enthusiasm for your own topic you can't expect them to. So I do it through written responses and then critique obviously and then when they do presentations like in progress critiques that's another layer of information so you have to get them motivated so I know that whether it's caffeine or when you're in the classroom you have to be on I don't think passive learning is even an option anymore especially in the studio arts because we have a three-hour class period it's not a lecture and a lab it's a lecture and a lab built together so half the time I feel like I'm facilitating a circus because you really have to juggle a lot and make sure that they're engaged in what they're doing. A lot of times I feel that it's through group projects like right now upstairs there's all these body shots and that was in 290 and he put us into groups and he really likes this collaborative effort and so a lot of times he'll just say you're gonna go in the lighting studio for this project and I want you guys as whole body to be in it so figure out a lighting situation that gets your whole body in it so then it's less Garth teaching you how to light but how a group interacts together to figure out how to work the lights in the studio to make a work and to make a collaborative effort and to make a group piece that has some sort of flow or concept and it'll do it's similar when you're in the dark room together and you have a project do tomorrow and everyone's kind of freaking out and people be like how do I how do I use a filter what does a filter do it's like oh well I went through this last year and a filter means this or someone will say my picture is really blurry I don't understand why it's not coming out and so you definitely feel that in these group spaces that he puts you into you're definitely talking with each other and learning through each other more so than I think you get in a lot of other classes