I’ll never forget her, a silver haired lady in the corner of our classroom. She seems very demur sitting there observing all of us, and then she spoke, she was direct, but gentle, stern, but kind, sensitive yet abrupt in her manner of speaking.
Little did I know that this woman, in my three year span of high school, would be the single most important person in my life other than my parents.
Her name was Mrs. Garcia, she was an Anglo woman married to a Hispanic man, but she had all the fire and passion of a Hispanic woman.
She loved art and everything about it, and didn’t see why her students didn’t feel the same. She pushed very hard and we respected her so much we didn’t dare push back.
When she recognized talent there was no stopping her, she would work with counselors to get the student into classes that nurtured their talent.
She was so confident in our abilities that she would sometimes bark out, “You’re going to Art school”! She made us believe if we worked hard enough we would go to college somewhere. As wet nosed kids, we believed her when she told us it was within reach.
Her classes were fun, creative and it seemed that the students in my class all had the same goals. We loved art because she showed us how to appreciate the masters. She explained in detail why a piece of art was great and all the important elements that made it great… Van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, were all part of our vocabulary.
She enrolled some of the exceptional students for special art classes at Cal Arts (then known as Chuinard Art Institute) and Art Center College of Design. We learned from the best and we excelled. It was a very unusual situation and I don’t know if this could be done in today’s tight educational budget and competitive world.
By the end of our senior year, seven of us had partial or full scholarships to California Institute of the Arts, one of the most prestigious art schools in the world. When I think back, I wonder what would have become of me if it weren’t for this wonderful silver haired teacher that saw something in a shy pimply-faced kid that I didn’t see in myself. That’s the power of a teacher.