what i have learned.

There is a blurry line between what I've learned in STAC, artistically, and what I've learned elsewhere. There are also the things I've learned in stac that don't directly connect with what we learned as a class, like meeting new people, and trying to teach if called on for help. My experience has been about Luke pushing me down the right rabbit hole. I don't have a problem with this; I feel that a lot of stac is about learning things yourself.

This year I've been against a major evil in my own life, which has come back to haunt me. This is the sameness monster, and it showed its face in august as I was preparing for school. It's why I changed my room around, and what I'm fighting now. And it's no one's fault but my own. And I should listen to Rilke. I am efficient, prepared, but that leaves me a lot of extra time that I'll need to fill. Luke said, "Why don't you just make a movie?", so I've resolved to teach myself animation after college portfolios are finished. It can't be that hard. I've learned everything I can without actually doing it. And by the end of the year, I'll have something.

I keep hearing shouts of "the trees were brown, but now they're every color", "I was blind, but now I see", and it's a beautiful thing to see people around me learn. That day of color helped me with color saturation the most, especially when I needed to figure out colors with AP art projects. And the movies we made were about movie-making, certainly, and group-work, but we got something amazing out of it: we felt together. We all had the same assignment, we worked in groups, and at the end, we laughed together. It was probably the most wonderful feeling of the quarter.

I've met so many new people, and that's something I needed to learn, especially for college. I've learned a lot about projections and attitudes, and about how to appear ways by projecting characteristics on other people.

I've learned pointalism, but not in stac. I'm trying to learn how to be okay with being looked up to for things. I have two younger siblings, but I've never had that seniority.

I don't know if I'll ever understand praise. I know it's goodwill, and an acknowledgement, and a social connector, but I'm still not okay. Part of it is that I'm pretty hard on myself. I hold myself to DaVinci and Kathe Kollwitz. And I've learned another thing. Make art for yourself, and not for people around you. Make your own decisions.

I am a senior, I am 17, and in many countries and times I would be married with a family. But the people in my class are still treated like children in many places, and it's not what happens in the real world. This year is a debriefing from school. Teachers aren't perfect, some people are mean, and aren't we old enough to make decisions without asking if it's okay?

I started stac when I was 15, and I hid behind Tommy and Glenn in the back of the room. There were some serious and terrible times in stac, and I didn't talk much. We went through personality problems, and we had to learn things that we should never have had to, like having to forgive as a group, and being in a group with someone you have no respect for. That won't happen this year. We have passion for what we do. This is a damn good group of artists.