The room at Kingsborough was nothing like what came later. No resistant teenagers, no behavioral plans, no reading individual students to figure out what they needed before they could receive anything. These were adults. They signed up. They showed up on purpose. Most of them wanted to be there, and the ones who were ambivalent at least chose it.

I loved the material. That part is hard to overstate. Standing in front of a room full of people who had never thought about why a poster works, or why one layout feels stable and another feels like it’s falling off the page. Introducing them to something I cared about deeply, knowing they were willing to receive it. That combination (willing room, material you love) is rare, and I recognized it even then.

The challenge was scaffolding. The motivation was already there. The behavior was fine. The question was pure construction: how do you take someone from zero knowledge of graphic design to understanding visual communication? Where does the ladder start? What’s the first rung?

You can’t open with theory. You can’t open with history. You open with looking. Here is a thing. What do you see? Not what does it mean, not what is the designer trying to say. What do you see? Color, shape, weight, position. The vocabulary comes after the looking, not before it.

Then you layer. Once they can describe what they see, you ask why. Why is this heavy and that light? Why does your eye go here first? Design has reasons. Every choice has a why behind it, and teaching from zero means building that understanding from the ground up. Not handing someone a set of rules. Building the perceptual apparatus that makes the rules obvious.

Victore’s influence was all over how I taught. He never let us coast on taste or intuition. If you couldn’t explain why you made a choice, you hadn’t made one. You’d made a guess. That same instinct drove my classroom: no bullshit, no arbitrary decisions, no “it just felt right.” Tell me why. And if you can’t tell me why, look harder until you can.

The full-circle part still gets me. I was a student at Kingsborough before I taught there. Judith Wilde found me in the halls, looked at my sketchbook, and quietly took over my schedule. She spent two years steering my development before sending me to SVA. Years later, I was standing in front of the same kind of room she’d pulled me out of. Teaching the same foundational seeing she’d taught me to do. The ladder I was building for my students was the same one she’d built for me.