Professor michael fink12/29/2023 ![]() My wife as a girl had watched me in F rench through Pictures on television in her public school classroom. I never lost sight of the inspiration of my Harvard professors, and always, consistently, acknowledged the undying influence of that program in almost every facet of my life. Decades later, another president, John Maeda, praised that slim volume lavishly, a high point in my career! It worked well enough for me to produce and publish Drawing with Words, a text that combined papers/essays written by my students along with quick sketches. ![]() My first “job” was to introduce a composition course - a required class, not an elective, for a so-called “slow section.” Suited me just fine, because my idea was to combine the idea of drawing with the invitation to use words to accompany the details perceived and observed by the incoming disciples. “We are launching a liberal arts department as we widen our curriculum from the studio majors separated from one another to a more general and collective model,” they said as they invited me to join the faculty with my dual degrees of a Yale B.A., a Harvard M.A.T., and a junior year at the Sorbonne. In the summer of 1957, my uncle Herbert Fink was teaching printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and introduced me to its president, John Frazier. ![]() “You speak French better than English” she actually said to me.ĭestiny had something else in store for me. Did a bit of tutoring on the side, after hours, and had a grand time for my initiation into using the skills I had read about and tried to use, up in Cambridge, where I had also played the part of a serving waiter in the French through Pictures experiment sponsored by Miss Gibson. I then accepted the post of a similar assignment in Eastchester, New York, and took an apartment right next door to the junior high building. I treasure as a souvenir the photograph of the graduating class of 1957, with the autographs of my first official students on the reverse side of the rolled up scroll. I became the instructor in French, as well as English, at the junior high school in Belmont, Massachusetts. Which, oddly enough perhaps, invites an almost Hemingway-esque attention to language! The second semester of the M.A.T. I recall a text by Hugh Walpole in which the classic folktales were reduced to a 500-word vocabulary. ![]() During that marvelous first semester I also met Marcel Marceau, the Holocaust survivor pantomimist, who had turned the Jewish orphans into everybody, existentially, and supported the notion that not the number of words but rather the observation of actions clarify one’s lot in life. Richards, who used the experiments of David Weinstein who believed that, upon the birth of the Israel, it was important, even urgent, to teach languages to immigrants from diverse cultures and linguistic roots with immediacy and rapid success. The Smith legacy was willing to make the switch. I sensed that my future lay not upon the landscape of legal rhetoric but instead in the classrooms of the community of students seeking more “poetic” lore. semester at Harvard, and my tuition was paid by the Charles Smith Award for Providence scholars, which was originally offered for Harvard Law School. My connection to HGSE began at the summer prelude in what was then Mount Ida College and then continued as I taught a class in East Providence on French for beginners based on the Language Through Pictures lecture approach that substituted performance for translation.
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