What an odd day! There was a time when I was handing out the assessments to students. Today I was on the receiving end. The Italian language course I attend at Leeds-Beckett University has arrived at the time of year when we are graded, and I have to say it has been an odd experience. Today we were examined for our conversational ability.
In many respects it was fun. Four of us were asked to prepare to talk about the health dangers of alcohol. (The text-book is terribly earnest and very moral.) So we sat around in a room and talked while the instructor filmed us. It all went well until there was gasp of horror from the instructor, who thought for a moment that the recording hadn’t worked, and we were going to have to repeat the exercise. As it happened, her anxiety was misplaced.
Reflecting on the experience afterwards has been interesting. For this type of occasion I don’t rely on notes prepared in advance, as I find these very inhibiting, especially if the conversation takes an unexpected turn. A couple of the other students were evidently relying heavily on a “script” they had written for themselves, and indeed their contributions to the discussion did come over as rather stilted. Looking at this in the context of the DVDs I have been watching about portraiture, as I drove back from Leeds, was instructive.
I do wonder whether it might be possible in art to be too closely tied to prescriptions about how it ought to be done. Every month the art magazines are full of “how to” articles, setting out in detail exactly how to achieve a certain kind of result. My fear is that if one were veto take all of this too seriously the end result would be terrible formulaic, rigid and rather lifeless. In art as in language you can’t really say that you can do it until you are able to fly by he seat of your pants.