Why I became a teacher:

I became a teacher because I want to enrich the culture of my community. In my travels I've come to understand that community involvement and appreciation are key to the sustainability of art forms like ceramics. Having worked in ceramics and studying with local masters for about a decade now, I've come to know this art form as a great way to bring people together and enrich communities. Ceramics has been the building block for developing nations since the beginning of history, and in such the principles of working with clay have been fundamentally the same for thousands of years. This means that an instructor can engage both younger and older students on the same level and they can both understand the working process. Ceramics encourages a lot of community involvement and appreciation for ones' neighbor. This gets people engaged in the workplace and communicating with one another. This also creates a sense of value in the student that helps to encourage patience and skill building. As they begin to understand the time and energy that go into the making of a piece of ceramics art or functional ware, they begin to value their work and the work of others more. This also further enriches that sense of value in the community and their connection to the earth. In closing I feel that some of the most valuable people in our communities are teachers and I want to do my best to instill a greater sense of value in my neighbors, like my elders and teachers did before me.