Notable Achievers in Your Community : Instructor Has Flair for the Art of Teaching
Gerald Scheib’s students either hate his classes or love them, but the ones who love them keep coming back again and again.
“That’s why teaching is so satisfying,” said Scheib, an art teacher at Mission College in Sylmar who sees art in everyday objects like the designs of cars, chairs and clothes. He was recently named California’s Outstanding Higher Education Art Educator by the California Art Education Assn. He believes he is the first community college teacher to earn the award.
Often his students walk into class insecure and unsure of their abilities, but then find the talent hidden within them. They get hooked, and keep coming back to take more classes, even auditing classes just to absorb more knowledge.
“I can’t get rid of these people,” he said, jokingly.
Scheib himself was hooked into art as a college student in the late 1950s and early 1960s while pursuing an engineering degree. He had been struggling through calculus and breezing through art classes, but thought everyone was like that.
“My heart wasn’t in engineering,” said Scheib, a member of the Sputnik generation who used to test model rockets in the desert.
Scheib and his friends at Bell High School in the 1950s--admittedly a group of nerds--would get together to grind telescope lenses and go on astronomy outings.
But in his third year in college, he switched his focus from engineering to art and graduated from Cal State Los Angeles. “I felt my life would be empty without it,” Scheib said.
He still has kept involved in engineering, with 20 years of experience in the U.S. Navy Reserves as an electronics technician. And what became his favorite forms of art--metal sculpting and jewelry-making--did neatly combine the precision of science and engineering with the creativity of artistic expression.
“I’ve always likened myself to being a pioneer,” Scheib said. He was the first photography teacher at Sylmar High School when it opened in 1963. After a stint as an art teacher at University High School, Scheib landed a teaching job at newly opened Mission College in 1975.
“You had to drive everywhere,” said Scheib, remembering what it was like when the college held classes in storefronts scattered around the San Fernando area. His first class was in a second-floor business office on Brand Boulevard. Even now, after the campus opened in Sylmar in 1991, the art classes still do not have a permanent site. Classes are held in a nearby county-owned building.
Scheib is one of only two full-time art teachers at the school, an example of what the current recession has done to educational budgets. There is not even an art major at the school, although the jewelry class Scheib teaches is a draw because Mission is one of only a few community colleges to offer the program.
But, Scheib, the past president of the California Art Education Assn. who earned the award partly because of his volunteer work to promote the arts in schools, is optimistic about the future of arts in colleges.
“Art is the reason for life,” said Scheib, arguing that students do better at schools when there is an art program. Even if they are not going to pursue a career in the arts, it helps give students a sense of fulfillment.
“It’s never been a problem finding students or finding an interest. We will survive.”
The scaling back of budgets is a necessary change in order to survive, but when tough times are over there has to be a place for arts.
“No one should be afraid of change,” Scheib said. “If we didn’t have change we would be dead.”
Change is also part of the reason he enjoys art.
“I never get tired of it,” said Scheib, who plans on working on his skills as a hand engraver when he retires in about three years. “There’s always something to learn.”
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