(This is my twelfth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
Now Oz Alon is a CEO if a business management platform so I’m looking at this article as more of an ad than a photo news story, but the idea that it’s hard to make ends meet by just doing wedding photography is not too much of a stretch for me.
I’ve been teaching at a K-8 arts academy for almost 20 years, now. When I started, I just taught elective classes. There was barely any photography, no videography to speak of (On 32 bit computers? Surely, you jest!), and the initial job description that I was told to go beyond only mentioned Microsoft Office products as my content area.
There were students making videos, but that was the purview of the TV Production teacher.
Move forward a couple years and budget cuts hit hard. I remember furloughs. It wasn’t a good time. In the shake-up, the TV Production department (our art department with the lowest enrollment) was cut and I inherited those students.
I started out trying to copy what they’d been doing. I had some experience with video at that point (I’d been posting videos here for a few years by then) and I’d been teaching storyboards for years in my previous visual art classes.
All videos, all the time. If it wasn’t a video, it was a plan for a video or critiques of student videos.
It was extremely limiting, but it’s what I thought was expected.
Here’s the thing, though: My class was never called “TV Production.” That program was gone. Mine was brand new. I could have done whatever I wanted, provided I found state or national standards that backed me up.
Eventually I branched out in bits and pieces. Students dipped their toes in music production using GarageBand, since we had a MacBook cart we could use.
We started taking more photos.
We made animations.
We made podcasts.
Minecraft came along and I started letting students create “adventure maps” so long as they scripted the challenges and recorded themselves completing them. I had them doing game design and it was wonderful.
Eventually the remaining TV Production departments in my district were rolled into a new department, Digital Media Arts, with its own state standards and everything. You know what? Those standards matched what I was doing with my more diverse lessons.
You know what most teachers did?
Video production, and nothing else.
You know why? You may want to make sure you’re sitting for this one:
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Inertia’s a heck of a thing.
There’s efforts to change this. On the district level my department still has its annual film festival, but now we also have a festival for podcasting and photography. We’re encouraged to branch out to those areas as well, and given sample lessons to help us step out of our comfort zones.
(Most of the high school photos come from the vis art students, though, because photography “has always been” visual arts and, again, inertia.)
But as slow as they may seem, changes are happening. Tomorrow, before I give my own song and dance to new teachers about things they can do, another awesome colleague will be talking to them about photography.
We’re not just TV Production any more. Haven’t been, for as long as my students have been breathing.
It’s good to see other people agree.