First of all, can you tell me your name?

Julian Deberry. 

Can you tell me what your position is here at LASA?

Yeah, I’m the ezine teacher, graphic design and advanced graphic design.

Tell me a little bit about yourself?

I was a student teacher here last year. During the fall semester for Miss Hewitt for art 1 and ceramics. For my graduate program, I went to school for art. My undergraduate, I went to school for film, photography, and I did a lot of graphic design there. So once I found out that Mr. Earley, the previous teacher was leaving. I jumped on that position, because I love graphic design, and I worked for The Austin Chronicle which ties into the scene.I was kind of blown away by the school when I was student teaching. So I really wanted to teach here.

How did you start out being a student teacher and what was that process like?

When I was in graduate school at Texas State, in order to finish the program, I had to be a student teacher, and they randomly assigned me a school. So you have to teach for 14 weeks, the first seven weeks, it’s with a high school, and the second seven weeks it can be a middle school or an elementary school, but I have no choice in the school. All I could say was what district I wanted, I just said Austin, and they assigned me LASA, which I never heard of. 

So the process of student teaching was that I came in here for seven weeks, the first week, I got acquainted with the classes. The second week, I’m the teacher in the class for Miss Hewitt, she takes a backseat. For the third week, fourth week, and fifth week, I make lesson plans each week and deliver them, and then I kind of pull myself back towards the end. So I was here for seven weeks. And then I was at the elementary school for another seven weeks. And then I finished student teaching, passing both of those courses.

How would you say your experience is with a teacher leaving early and you having to take over his classes?

Well, with E-Zine it’s not. It’s kind of like I’m starting fresh because I’m only teaching freshmen and it’s a new class each semester. So I’m not coming in midway for them, it is like I’m some new teacher, but with graphic design it’s a different story. They’ve been doing that since the beginning of the year. So, the students have been helping me out a lot and I have been asking them, what the previous teacher Mr.Early was teaching them, like what programs they were using. And then I kind of structured my lesson plans around that, for example if they don’t know about Adobe Illustrator. Let me start teaching them Adobe Illustrator. And then I kind of progressed my way from there.

You said you worked at The Austin Chronicle. Can you tell me a little bit more about your experience with them?

Yeah, I was writing for film. It’s called the screens section of the Austin Chronicle and the editor, his name is Richard Whittaker. That was a lot of fun. I worked there for a couple of years, I would write about the film scene around Austin, I would write about the Austin Film Society. Fantastic Fest and just all the film festivals because Austin is such a huge film town. So every week I would get a word count for how much I was supposed to write, usually between 400 and 600 words, and then I would just kind of pitch a piece that I want to write, he would then approve it or not, and then once the story got the okay, I started to  write the story. I can conduct interviews and so on. But it mostly revolved around the film festivals around SXSW, Fantastic Fest Austin Film Festival.

As the new E-Zine and graphic design teacher , what’s been your favorite part of just the classes overall?

For graphic design, I’m very familiar with Adobe programs, but I find the students kind of teaching me in a back and forth relationship with just certain avenues that I wasn’t aware of what the programs can do, so I find that very nourishing. That might  not be the right word, but I just find a nice dynamic to be happening between the graphic design students and the E-zine students. These students are very willing to learn, they don’t get overwhelmed by those programs and having to interview people, which is not what I expected going in. They seem very immersed in what they have to do, and I find that refreshing,

And visa-versa what is your least favorite part or what is something that you are concerned about or stuff coming into this.

My least favorite part? Can it be trivial? Or do you want something serious?

Okay, you know, I don’t like the students in my class after lunch, bringing soup to

eat in my third period of class, but I’ll give you something better than that.

I mean, what specifically? Is it the soup specifically or students eating soup in general?

It’s just them working with soup in front of the keyboard. And I’ve seen them spill things and I’m just like, “why didn’t you eat lunch? During lunch?”  But a more job related aspect is more of an admin thing, but one of the frustrations I have is a lot of students are locked out of Adobe. And I can’t do anything about it.