“Um…Do You Know Carson Palmer?”

Over this past Christmas holiday, my Aunt asked me if I would be willing to come and give a talk at a local private grade school on working as an artist professionally. At the time, the first Thursday in February seemed like awhile away and it’s pretty hard to say no to your Godmother, so I said “sure.”

Well, I forgot all about it until she reminded me yesterday and as a result I didn’t really take the time to prepare something for it as I should have, but as it turns out it didn’t really matter much. I always thought I would dread something like this, but the kids were so genuine and sweet that I could’ve been talking about being a potato farmer or creating a new type of waffle and they would’ve gotten about the same amount of information out of the talk.

Since I really had nothing prepared, I went through the usual spiel about how I arrived at design, where I went to school, blah, blah, blah. And then I posed a question to the group asking them to define graphic design. Some of them had some decent ideas here and there. They knew about logos and signs and junk and one of them even brought up “pinstriping.” (They ranged in age from 5th through 7th grade, so that last one surprised me a bit.) After I started to explain to them all of the different places in their life where they can find graphic design and how much they use it everyday, it may have sunk in for about three or four of the 100+ kids I was speaking to. But the interesting thing for me was just how polite and attentive they were trying to be, even if what I was saying made no sense to them.

Well that was enough of me talking, so I started the question and answer session by asking them what some of their favorite logos were, and their responses sounded like they were reading line for line off of the mall directory kiosk. Aeropostel, American Eagle, Old Navy and on and on and on. This went on for probably 10 minutes. Realizing that we were getting a bit off track, I asked if any of them had any “questions” about graphic design. One of them then asked me if I had designed anything that they would recognize or was famous. I started to tell them how I’ve done some design work for the group of surgeons that work on the Cincinnati Reds and Cincinnati Bengals and that they may have seen my logo and advertisement designs for them in the baseball program or on some television commercials. Another hand then goes up. (This is when it really got great.)

“So, Um…do you know Carson Palmer?”

“Uhhh, no. No I don’t.”

Another hand.

“Yes?”

“Do you know Ken Griffey Jr.?”

“No. I met him once, but I don’t really know him.”

Another hand,

“Yes, you?”

“Ummm…so, do you think Carson Palmer will be okay?”

“Yeah, I think he’s going to be just fine.”

“Good. ’Cause I was pretty worried.”

Another hand.

“So most of what you do is really for girls right?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, the stuff you make is all for stuff that gets bought, and everybody knows that girls are the ones who buy stuff.”

“Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. It probably goes both ways.”

Another hand goes up.

“Can I have your autograph?”

“Sure.”

It was just about then when the moderator wrapped up the presentation session and that was it. Teaching college students is very, very, very different from teaching in a grade school. I’m definitely working in the right place.