Spotlight on Ms. Kesten

Chloe Kesten was born and raised in California. She left to go to Lewis and Clark College, which is located in Portland, Oregon. Then she came to New York and attended graduate school at Hofstra University. This is her second year teaching art, her first at QSI. And she’s lucky to live close enough to ride her bike to work. 

Q: What was high school like for you?

A: High school was fun for the most part, but I did have some of the classic issues. I was bullied, in middle school especially, but it carried over into high school. However, I did play basketball, so I had that friend group around me and I was really close to a handful of high school teachers, so that was always a positive thing. 

Q: How would you describe your experience at Lewis and Clark College?

A: So, I didn’t stay at home…I left my family, left all my friends, went to school without knowing anybody. But, it was so much more free-flowing, all the responsibilities are on you, there’s no one calling home because you didn’t turn in an assignment. Classes were so different from high school, a lot of it was lecture-based. Academically and socially, it doesn’t even compare to high school.  

Q: Was there a specific moment when you knew you were going to be a teacher?

A: No, there wasn’t. The choice to become a teacher happened later in my life. When I was in college, I wanted to and still aspire to be more of a professional artist and support myself making art… So back in that time, teaching wasn’t really on my radar. [After college] I did odd jobs, but I was pursuing art at the same time, for like the five years that I took between undergrad and going to get my masters.

I sort of realized, slowly… that I could be doing something more and thought about how I could combine making art with something meaningful. It logically made sense to think about teaching art to young people.

Q: What are your interests outside of art?

A: Basketball is my number one and I still play. I love to sing and I used to play piano, but when I went to college I stopped practicing. I love to thrift, definitely a shopaholic for secondhand clothes. 

Q: Was there anything that was challenging when becoming a teacher and/or when you started teaching?

A: I was in graduate school, learning how to be a teacher right when COVID hit. I was very lucky that I got to be a student-teacher in classrooms, but it was still was very challenging.

In general, as a teacher, I think the thing that’s a huge challenge… is that when you’re in [graduate] school everything is like hypothetical, you’re not in front of a bunch of kids teaching and you’re learning how to do it through theory and writing lesson plans, so it’s such a strange thing to just suddenly be in front of kids. I think something that can make teaching challenging is the environment that you’re in because at my old school it was definitely not as positive as it is here. So the environment that you’re in is going to either pose a challenge or do the opposite, uplift you. 

Q: How do you feel about teaching mostly middle school classes?

A: I love teaching middle school… I think middle school tends to get a bad rep. 

Q: Would you like to teach more high school classes?

A: I would love to teach elective art classes for high school students. The only issue is that we only have this one room and we only have me; there’s not another visual arts teacher. I’m always going to have to teach all the middle school grades and freshman classes, so I might not be able to add cool electives. But that’s definitely something I would love to incorporate because a lot of kids in my high school class now are saying they can’t take art again.

Teaching high school is fun because we can have deeper conversations about art and art making… at an elevated level, so that’s a huge plus to high school teaching, diving deeper into things and techniques.