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Home > Features > Stuart Lade: Exploring a New History
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Stuart Lade: Exploring a New History
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by Jenna Schnuer
Freelance Writer
New York, New York
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| | After 23 Years, A New Challenge
Stuart Lade could have coasted through the rest of his career at Minnesota's Brainerd High School. Instead, four years ago, after 23 years of teaching U.S. History and 12 years teaching AP U.S. History, Lade decided to shake up his status quo and launch the school's first AP Art History course. Although he hadn't had much of a formal art history education, Lade did have a supportive network of people well versed in the subject matter and lingo. His daughter was an art history major in college, one of his closest friends is the director of Baltimore's prestigious Walters Art Museum, and another friend teaches art history in Baltimore.
His decision to teach a new subject didn't surprise anyone. As a teacher, he pushes his students to explore new territory and "he demands the same thing of himself. As soon as it becomes easy and rote, he needs a new challenge," says Jill Johnson, a member of Brainerd's graduating class of 1989.
Lade's greatest strengths as a teacher are his "natural curiosity, his intellect, passion for his subject, and love of students," says Bob Gross, superintendent of schools for the Singapore American School in Singapore and former superintendent of the Brainerd school system.
During the 2001-2002 school year, Lade's course load included three sections of AP U.S. History, each with 25 students, and one section of AP Art History with 15 students. Brainerd High School, which has more than 1,600 students across three grades, offers 19 AP classes. In 2001, 513 AP Exams were administered in the school.
Changing His Ways
Lade says developing the course was like "old dog, new tricks." Since he didn't have a strong art history background, he would do his reading on the weekends to prepare for upcoming lessons. He relied on the strength of the textbook, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, which he says is "a real masterpiece," as well as "the belief that content can drive the course." The book, and Lade's course, covers art history from the cave
drawings through contemporary times. Lade says the only prerequisite for the course is that students "have to be able to lift the book."
Over the four years he has taught art history, Lade has happily learned that there are profound differences between teaching his two subjects. "Discussions in U.S. History are often ethical or content-based, why this happened and how should we interpret that. It's an attempt to find the truth," says Lade. But art history "is much wider, much more passionate and emotional. Sometimes a painting can psychologically open you up. [My students] were sometimes so caught up that things start to pour out of them." He adds that, at times, he must help students navigate these emotionally charged discussions so that they don't expose personal information they'll later regret.
Both Johnson and Gross say that Lade's ability to guide his students toward their best thinking and to help them discover themselves are some of his greatest assets as a teacher. "He really fostered a love of learning" and gave students the tools they could use to find "a way out of this tiny little town," says Johnson, who now works for the Global Healthcare Services division of GE's Medical Systems business. Before she began her studies with Lade, Johnson says she really didn't look very far beyond Brainerd's city limits: "The whole experience lit me on fire." Adds Gross: "He has this natural ability to reach deep down inside students and pull out what they themselves did not know was there."
The exploration of art history through in-class discussion truly excites Lade. He says the class usually has some "social scientists who can hack the material" and some artists who can provide commentary on technique. "It's a nice meld, and the interchange between the two can be quite rich." During a discussion on Mannerism, Lade says that except for one girl, nobody in the class was particularly excited by the material, "but she brought the rest of us around."
Johnson, who had Lade for AP U.S. History as a sophomore and continued working with him on a course of independent study during her junior and senior years, says that Lade personally enjoys intellectual dialogue as much as he enjoys taking his students on a journey through history. "He sparks intellectual curiosity that I didn't match again until I went to grad school at the University of Chicago," she says. "The level of discussion was far beyond the years of the people in the room."
Not Always the Expert
Teaching the new course has also been, at times, a humbling experience. "I had to admit at times what I didn't know," says Lade. He believes that experiencing the "same levels of anxiety" his students go through has been good for him as a teacher.
Lade's latest teaching passion has had a strong impact on the students who have passed through his class. Of the 60 art history students he has taught over the last four years, nine have gone on to major in the subject in college. He happily speaks of another student, the son of a fundamentalist minister, who immediately panned modern art at the beginning of the school year. "Then he went off to college and put a Jackson Pollack up on his wall," says Lade.
"Students find Mr. Lade intriguing," says Gross. "They quickly learn that this is not an ordinary teacher. Students sign up for his classes not so much because of the subject, but simply to be in a class with Stuart. I often dream about what it would be like to have an entire faculty with Stuart's ability and engaging teaching style."
Jenna Schnuer has held full-time positions as a Senior Editor of Folio: First Day, Online Editor for Publishers Weekly, and Book Club Channel Producer for iVillage.com. She has written for magazines and Web sites including Advertising Age, Oxygen's ka-ching, and Hoover's Online. |
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