Rolanda Scott: On The Art of Teaching 

by Charles McGuigan 07.2010

Rolanda Scott can take a chunk of solid glass, drop it in a flower pot then super heat it in her kiln, turning it into liquid, which she then pours it into a mold, creating a sculpture unlike anything else in the world. But she can do this other thing that makes all other art seem paltry by comparison: Rolanda can take young minds, as malleable as heated glass, and shape them into willing vessels that will themselves create. She can pass along that need and desire to make and to transform.

Rolanda Scott’s art class is buzzing with about twenty kids—some kindergarteners, some first graders. They’re making hand puppets out of brown lunch bags. They glue on google eyes, make lips of construction paper, give their creations wigs and even hats. And the kids are proud of them, coddling them like their own infants.

“Sometimes I feel like the leader of the lunatic fringe,” says Rolanda. “I’m where I think I do best. I love the chaos but they’re all doing stuff that they need to be doing.”

Rolanda has loved art since she was a child. “I was a kid who always doodled in school,” she says. “I was always making something. I’m a habitual object maker. I’m always making something. If I’m at home and I’m sitting I’m working, doing something. I’m either crocheting or most of the time now I’m cutting up stuff or counting and wrapping or getting yarn ready for kids to do this, or getting google eyes stuck on stickers so they can do that.”

She tells me that she prefers giving students projects that require the use of both hands. “It’s not like sitting down with a pencil and drawing,” she says. “I’ve had kids just so absolutely pleased with themselves from a drawing but they really haven’t interacted with it like they do a piece of paper and a pair of scissors.”

And that’s probably because the act of drawing is contemplative. You concentrate on what you’re about to draw and then guide your pencil-wielding hand along the paper. “But kids using both hands are flipping hands,” says Rolanda. “They’ll be working with one hand and then it’s like, ‘I didn’t know you were left handed’, and it’s like ‘well, I’m not then.’ They’re finding their own flexibility. And I think it will show in their thinking, I really do think that the ability to change hands is directly related to the ability to make an about face and change your mind, which a lot of adults criticize people for doing.”

She considers artists who will make abrupt changes in style from one period of their artistic expression to another. “A lot of artists are criticized because they were doing this and all of a sudden they were doing this other thing and all of a sudden they’re doing something different,” Rolanda says. “They’ve changed their thinking and a lot of people are narrow and if they can’t follow that one path, they’re not happy. That’s the thing that makes kids so wonderful because they can change in a second and they’ll get another idea and there they go down the road with it.” 

One of her kids is trying to make a Dalmatian lunch bag puppet. But more of the dots are on his hands than are on the brown bag, and these dots have glue all over them. He keeps trying to peel them off his arms but then they get stuck to his fingers and he seems to be on the verge of tears. At that moment another kid, one who’s older by a full year, intervenes. He’s been there before and he methodically removes every Dalmatian spot from his class mates tiny forearm and comforts him with reassuring words. “This is a multi-aged k-one group,” says Rolanda. “So it’s a wonderful class. I think probably my favorite in the building because I can do a lot with this group that I might not do with say a kindergarten class or I might not do with a first grade because here they help each other, and I think that’s the most important thing about it.”

She surveys the room, handily fielding questions as we talk. “When you watch everybody with a reason to what they’re doing,” says Rolanda. “They’re out of their seats but they’re going to help each other or they’re going to look at each other’s project or talking to each other, I don’t have to do anything other than interact individually with them.”

Her eyes well up with tears. “It makes you feel good, particularly at the end of the year, when I can look at this class and say what a success because I know that ones that are going onto second grade have skills that some of the first graders in another class might not have simply because they’ve helped a kindergartener,” she says. “They’ve helped them make decisions, they’ve advised, they’ve done all those things that we like to do as adults to other people. The minute I have somebody who has a skill that they can share I get them to share it with somebody else which only enriches what they can do.”

As the class nears its conclusion, Rolanda has the kids put their materials away and one by one they show their instructor what they have made. They are proud of their handiwork which will no doubt be displayed on the family’s refrigerator on another venue of artistic reverence in the home.

The classroom’s quiet now as Rolanda tells me how kids can do so much with so little raw material because each one of them embodies the temperament of the real artist. “I think the most important thing for children is to be given the opportunity to express themselves,” she says. “Where else can you use a dollar’s worth of paper bags, some scrap paper, some glue, scissors and google eyeballs and express yourself in as many ways as this group of twenty children just did. They took a piece of paper and imagination.”

She considers the influence of technology. “I have a hard time with electronic games because I think kids get tuned into a very, very narrow level of expression,” says Rolanda. “They’re fighting time, they’re fighting response, they’re trying to do something in a rapid succession of time, but they’re not given the freedom to expand ideas. This is all done in a very compressed time whereas what we just did was very expanded time. They could have worked for another hour easily.”

Engaging with the medium, investigating its plasticity, reforming and reshaping it, experimenting with the limits, is what real art is about. “They were wanting to make another puppet,” she says of her students. “They were all coming up saying can we do another one and then they were like well what will we use for eyes and I’m like well what do you think you’re going to use for eyes, if I don’t have them you’re going to have to make them. And I daresay if I had given them five more minutes to make eyes we would have another full hour and a half project and they would have ended up with two or three people, or two or three characters.”

Rolanda picks up an unadorned brown paper bag. She turns it over in her hands, inspecting the seams at the bottom. “Children still have the freedom to dream,” she says. “And I think quite often we squelch that in children. Instead of playing into their imagination we tend to downplay it.”

Many adults, so cocksure of themselves and so entrenched in dogma, have lost the ability to stretch their imaginations. 

“We lose part of the most wonderful thing that children can provide us when we squelch their imagination,” Rolanda says. “Children can go up to adults and put them in a totally different world by interacting with them on a fantasy level, or an imaginative level, and a lot of times, particularly when volunteers come in here they walk out so much happier than when they were when they came in. And it’s not from any earth-shattering experience, it’s simply they’ve watched children do what children do best: they have imagination; they’ve played with material; they have turned something into something totally different with their hands.”

Rolanda constantly marvels at how quickly her students figure things out on their own and learn them. And how willing they are to impart this knowledge to others. “I wish I could think as quick as some of them do,” says Rolanda. “Because some of their solutions to problems that they give each other are so much better than any I can give. They come up with their own best ideas, their own best instructions. If I want to teach somebody how to do something I teach one child how to do it and then let them teach other children. I think all of our children want to share. They’d build your house for you if they could.” 

Rolanda capitalizes on the kids’ natural desire to help one another. She takes them outside the small confines of this classroom. “You’ve got to help people,” she says. “If you don’t then there’s no reason to be here. We did the Pin Wheels for Peace because one person can make a difference and the kids need to know that. We’ve done Empty Bowls. We’ve done bags for Caritas. At one point I had the kids sew pillows for pediatric oncology. They need to know that they need to be doing stuff for other people, that they’re not the only person in the world.”

The act of making something frequently helps the artists themselves. “These kids are artists in the purest sense of the word,” Rolanda says. “They make things because it feels good. They make things because it makes them happy. I’ve had a child come in here weaving who was angry at the world and he came up to me afterwards, which kind of surprised me, and he said, ‘Thank, you Miss Scott.’ And I said, ‘For what.’ And he said, ‘I feel so much better now.’ He had sat and woven, a very repetitive over-under process using both hands and he gave himself something to concentrate on. It got him off of what his problem was and he felt better for it.”

Not long after she started teaching at Holton—and she was among the first batch of teachers here ten years ago—Rolanda, while staying with her parents in upstate South Carolina during the summer, discovered a lump on her breast.

“I’ve been fighting breast cancer since 2002,” Rolanda tells me. “It seems like forever. The kids have gone through seeing me with hair, without hair, partially grown hair. Right now I’ve got hair and that’s cool and they’ll come in and look at me and go, ‘Miss Scott you’ve got hair,’ and then some kids that are new will go, “Well didn’t she always have hair,’ and they’ll go, ‘No.’ So they’ve watched me turn green and all that good stuff. But I think a lot of my being able to keep going has been because I keep going here and you know the world doesn’t seem so bad when you’re so busy and in a good place and you’re happy. And I don’t think I can ever be any happier than I have been in a classroom with a bunch of kids going, ‘Miss Scott this is really cool.’”

A little over ten years ago I watched Rolanda Scott work her wonders on glass that was anything but cool. She is a glass sculptor of the first magnitude, solar in her artistic intensity. Along with blown glass, Rolanda also creates sculptures some of which are housed in the permanent collections of two of the most venerable museums devoted to glass sculpture. 

“I have a small piece in the Christmas collection at the White House,” says Rolanda. “And people are amazed by this and I’m going, ‘That’s not the important one—the important one’s the American Museum of Glass and the Corning Musueum of Glass. I’m looking forward to making some new work. I’ve got the urge, which is good, because I haven’t had that in a while.”

Since the onset of cancer, which has metastasized at least three times, Rolanda has been pretty forthright with her students about her illness. 

“Sometimes you feel like you’re looking at another world,” she says. “The world doesn’t feel the same or the right way. But then you have the kids go, ‘Miss Scott did they put the medicine on your head?’ And you look at them and go, ‘No actually it was a shot,’ and then I’ll get a very stricken look from a kid and realize that they’ve had a shot recently and I’ll look at them and go, ‘Sweetheart did they give you my medicine? And she’ll go, ‘No.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well then you’re not going to loose your hair.’”

In other instances her students will relate to Rolanda their personal experiences with cancer. “Some wonderful, wonderful things have happened,” she says. “I’ve had kids come up and show me where they had a port and that they didn’t have any hair. And I’ve had some little ones come up and ask me if I’m gonna die. And I’ll look at them and go, ‘I don’t have a date stamped on me, there’s nothing that says I spoil at a certain time.’”

Not long after the initial diagnosis and surgery Rolanda was down in South Carolina, taking stock of her life. Her father had just died. 

“So I went out to the cemetery and sat down on my dad’s stone and had a good cry,” she remembers. “I couldn’t cry very long because there was a funeral about ten feet away. But nobody asked me why I was crying. And I thought to myself, ‘Why me, why this?’ I had a big pity party for about ten minutes and then I thought I’m not accomplishing anything and I’m not sure that I really feel better.”

A few days later, back in Richmond, she attended services at an Anglican church. The priest, during his homily, invited the congregation to look out the windows at the blue, loving sky. 

“He said, ‘Beautiful sky isn’t it? Beautiful day, isn’t it?,’” Rolanda recalls. 

The congregation gave a unified nod. And then he said this: “Why me?”

And Rolanda thought, “That answered my question. You know why am I going to complain when something goes wrong, why don’t I complain, ask why me, when something goes right. I get a little emotional over this because it really was one of those momentous moments in my life. And every morning when I get up and look at the sky, why me, I’m still here. So I know why I’m here probably for that reason. But I know that I’m very fortunate to have a job like this where I can reap the benefits of the children’s wonder without letting too many people know how much fun I’m having.”

Rolanda Iris Scott died July 6 after battling cancer for years. She was a survivor and a fighter. And this: an incredibly gifted artist. With her able hands she coaxed molten glass into indescribable sculptures some of which grace the Corning Museum of Glass and the White House in Washington, D.C. 

Rolanda also sculpted young minds—thousands over the years—in the Richmond public schools. My son Charles benefitted from her teaching for three years. My daughter Catherine (who has become quite an artist herself) had the great good fortune of learning from Rolanda in kindergarten. 

Rolanda was a patient teacher who treated every child as a rare vessel. She saw art in all things and taught her students to do the same. Rolanda told me that one of the keys to art is to remain open to all things to discover and rediscover mystery as a child does. Rolanda succeeded in this.

Twelve years ago Rolanda gave me a glass orb the size of a pomegranate like similar ornaments that bedecked the White House Christmas tree. Each year my kids and I carefully removed this singular ornament when we prepare to decorate our Christmas tree. This ornament has strength to it, but it is also fragile. Like us all.  On its surface there are worm-like ridges dribbled on this sphere when it was molten and being given life by the breath of Rolanda Scott. Of all our many ornaments we treasure this one the most.