Very bad experience at this place. I usually don't use a person's name in a review, but in this case will do so in order to provide the full story. I took a beginners' pottery class taught by Jinna Lincoln, and an assistant. These are the facts of the experience:
At the start of the first session Jinna said that she didn't really want to be teaching the class, she would rather be using the time to create her own pottery, but management kept asking her to teach the class, so she agreed.
At the beginning of each of these beginners' sessions, Jinna would provide a brief bit of instruction. Then she would go to a table and spend the rest of each class making her own pottery pieces. Every so often she would hold up one of these pieces, which were lumpy objects that she said were meant to hold things like taco fixings, and she would say to the class, look what I made. And all of the students were supposed to ooh and aah.
Jinna never walked around during the sessions to provide assistance to the students.
The assistant did walk around to provide assistance. However. She was angrily impatient, shockingly impatient, when a beginner didn't know how to do something perfectly on the very first try. The assistant seemed to seethe with fury, spewing angry words through clenched teeth. Even better, she would grab tools out of students' hands, in order to do a technique herself rather than explain and teach it to the student. In the space of five minutes, she grabbed tools out of my hand at least eight times, making very unwelcome and unwanted physical contact each and every time.
This description might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn't. I've been to college, graduate school, and boot camp, and in all that time I've never had an instructor as angrily impatient as this assistant. Nowhere near. I am about the furthest thing from a snowflake that a person can get, yet I was still shocked by her behavior.
And what did Jinna do about this abuse? She sat there in the small room making her lumpy objects, listening to the assistant being astonishingly inappropriate with students, but didn't say one single thing. This went on class after class after class.
My terrible experience with the assistant happened the first class. After that I avoided any interaction with the assistant. And Jinna provided no instruction (after the bit at the beginning of each session) or assistance. So for the remaining sessions I received essentially no instruction. I kept my head down class after class, doing my best to learn something on my own. When the class was finally over, the last of the sessions completed, I was very glad. In all my years of education, never before had I had an experience like this one. read more
