Colorful displays adorn the walls, while others hang from the ceiling. Tables and countertops are covered with projects, leaving room for little else. Some are completed, and others are works in progress. Many are covered with a sheen of clay dust from pottery projects.
This school year, many of the projects have a decidedly Asian feel to them, which is no surprise since Stuckey’s been teaching her students about a three-week trip she took to Japan in October as part of the Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program.
A native of New York, Stuckey’s been teaching in Moore County since 1977. She was born and raised in Mount Kisco, N. Y., a suburb of New York City.
With the exception of a brief stint near West Point, she lived in Mount Kisco until she was in the seventh grade, when her family moved to Boston. After graduating high school in Boston in 1968, Stuckey attended college at the University of New Hampshire. In 1972, she graduated with a degree in art education.
Her education didn’t stop there.
Stuckey attended East Carolina University, where she took 36 hours of graduate art courses. She also earned a degree in school administration from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
She still attends classes when she can.
“I’m continually educating myself,” she says. “I think that if you’re a teacher you’re also a student, and you have to keep your mind alive and energized and excited. I think it keeps you young if you’re thinking and learning.”
She says keeping her mind alive by furthering her education translates into a more varied learning environment for her students. She has been attending one-week sessions at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.
“I’m always learning things I didn’t know about, and I’m always changing my curriculum,” she says. “I’m looking for ways to upgrade all the time.”
Having a varied curriculum is important for middle school students.
“You’re supposed to be able to offer a variety of media so they can explore it and learn more about it,” Stuckey says. “If I learn more about it, I can come back with more ideas for them.”
Japanese Theme
This year, Stuckey’s students have been able to learn about Japanese art following her recent trip to Japan. Stuckey used a Fulbright Memorial Scholarship to take a trip to Japan in October.
“I downloaded an application off the Internet, filled it out and sent it in,” she says. “I was nervous and excited when I found out I would be able to go to Japan.”
Once she arrived, she says, Japan was more than she expected it to be. Her expectations had been based on ideas she’d been required to come up with about how she would apply what she learned on the trip in her classroom.
“I tried to read a lot and find out what I could to be prepared,” she says. “I thought, as an art teacher and with all the beautiful art in Japan, that I would make a connection with an art teacher in their schools. But I was surprised to find that there is no strong art education program in Japan, except for after school. They stay after school until about 7 o’clock at night. It’s very different.”
The teachers also stay until 7 p.m., supervising the numerous after-school clubs and activities.
“That’s when the arts come into play,” Stuckey says. “They can choose art or kendo stick fighting, which is like fencing. They can also choose American sports like basketball or volleyball. Baseball is very big. That’s their favorite sport.”
Students teach many of the after-school lessons.
“They are respectful of each others’ abilities and are led by the most capable students,” she says. “The teachers are on campus, but they’re not heavily supervising the kids. The students did not need supervision.”
Other differences include the fact that there are no cafeterias in Japanese schools.
“They all bring their lunch boxes,” she says.
The schools do not have janitors, either.
“There’s a focus on self-discipline,” Stuckey says. “They have their own cleaning times. The kids clean the bathrooms and the floors and everything is spotless. There’s nobody supervising them. They do this on their own. Everybody knows where to go and what to do.”
Another interesting thing Stuckey learned about Japan is that they’ve recently stopped sending kids to school on Saturdays.
“In a way it was like going back in time to when I was a child in the 1950s,” she says.
Stuckey was in Japan mostly to observe.
“They didn’t try to hide anything,” she says. “I went to their PTA meetings and saw the board of education. Not everything is good. They’re worried about things in their schools, too.”
Initially, Stuckey was concerned that there wasn’t any art curriculum, but that didn’t last long.
“I didn’t have to worry, because art permeates their culture,” she says. “It’s in the presentation of meals. The way food is presented and arranged is to be admired. Every house has a scroll with a beautiful flower arrangement. Even the kendo is done very politely and methodically. Everything is just neat, clean and beautiful.”
Learning to write Japanese characters is an art form itself.
“Young children with little brushes are taught to sit correctly and write their language properly,” Stuckey says. “They have to learn several hundred characters by second grade. By the time they’re in sixth grade, they can paint 8,000 characters.”
Stuckey enjoyed the first class accommodations that came with the scholarship. She thought she would be sleeping on a futon, but instead had a queen-size bed in a five-star hotel. The view overlooked the Emperor’s Garden in Tokyo.
“Everybody was bowing and greeting me,” she says. “I was treated like the queen of the United States.”
She had to mind her manners, too.
“The manner of presenting business cards is important,” Stuckey says. “We had orientations on how to behave correctly so we wouldn’t be considered rude.”
Stuckey says she’s been teaching her students something about Japan every day since she returned.
One of the lessons involved origami. Stuckey has dozens of paper cranes in her room as evidence.
Cultural Adjustments
Stuckey first came to North Carolina to attend East Carolina. She had finished student teaching in Boston and taken her first job in New York. A New York state requirement that teachers earn a master’s degree prompted her decision to attend graduate school.
“There were five top art schools,” she says. “I wanted to go to a top art school, and on my salary I had to find an affordable one. I’d been raised in the city and wanted something more rural. At that time, East Carolina was a top art school in the country, and it was rural.”
When she arrived, she didn’t know she would be here to stay until meeting her future husband, Cliff, who is now a professor and head of the fine arts department at Sandhills Community College.
“He was graduate teaching assistant and I was in his pottery class,” she says. “When I first met him, I admired him, but I thought he didn’t like me because he was so demanding. I think he liked me and wanted me to be his best student, but I didn’t know that. He was trying to encourage me to reach my maximum potential. It wasn’t until after classes were over that he asked me out. I was very surprised.”
The Stuckeys have two children, Joshua and Skyla. Joshua is an engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Skyla is a student at SCC and plans to transfer to N.C. State and pursue an art degree.
Stuckey recalls having to make some cultural adjustments when she first moved to Greenville.
“It was very different from what I was used to, especially the language,” she says. “I got lost on the way down and had to stop and ask several people for directions. I listened politely and was almost more confused because I didn’t understand the language. It was that foreign to me.”
After her husband graduated and took a position at Sandhills, Stuckey came to Moore County with him. She taught sixth grade for one year at Aberdeen Middle School before moving to The O’Neal School in 1977.
“I was looking for an art position, and The O’Neal School needed an art teacher,” she says. “It was a wonderful place to work, and it was right across the street from Sandhills, where Cliff was working.”
Stuckey says one of the challenges she enjoyed about working at The O’Neal School was the fact that she got to teach students in grades kindergarten through 12.
“I learned to be empathetic with the older students and learned what they wanted, while the kindergartners needed someone very happy, gentle, sweet and creative,” she says. “I would take on a role and lower my vocabulary. I enjoyed working with the younger kids. But I have fun with all the grades.”
She says she can’t use the same language with younger students and middle school students because the older children see themselves as young adults.
“They don’t want to be babied,” she says. “Then when you get to students that might be going to Ivy League colleges, you have to be erudite and perceptive while being creative and challenging. I had books and books of lesson plans, one for each grade level.”
‘Loves Teaching Art’
After a 10-year stint at The O’Neal School, Stuckey returned to Aberdeen Middle. She says she returned to the public schools because that’s where her children were going to be.
“I started out with a job that split me between Sandhills Farm Life and Aberdeen,” she says. “Then I was a full-time teacher at Aberdeen Middle School for 10 years. When New Century Middle School opened, I moved there.”
Stuckey earned her degree in school administration while she was teaching at Aberdeen Middle. She says she’s decided to stay in the classroom because she “loves teaching art.”
“I did some (administrative) practicums here in Moore County, which I think has helped my teaching,” she says. “You get to see the other side, the bigger picture. I think it’s helped me be a more effective teacher.”
Cliff Stuckey says his wife is probably a better teacher than he is “because it’s harder to teach middle school kids than college students.”
Stuckey recalls filling in at Sandhills while her husband was off for six weeks on a Fulbright Scholarship of his own.
“I guess the biggest difference is that at his school the people have already had a lot of learning and they’re paying for the opportunity to be in your classroom,” she says. “In the public schools, they want you to use your time very effectively, and there’s a bell every 45 minutes, five days a week. You have a lot of power in the public schools because you get to influence so many children.”
She says teaching in the public schools limits the amount of time she can devote to her own art, but she makes up for it during the summer breaks.
“That’s when I continue my education,” she says. “That’s why I applied for the Fulbright. I needed a little sabbatical.”
Stuckey doesn’t have a favorite medium.
“I bounce around,” she says. “I explore different media because that’s what’s exciting to me. I do have a tendency to like sculpture and pottery.”
