Fred, with all due respect I can't help but take this kind of letter with a big dose of skepticism.
Teachers simply don't teach everything, nor should they. The teacher's recent degree from Yale, for instance, means most likely that it won't be a traditional representational drawing course. Since the 80's Yale has been one of the main graduate programs teaching nontraditional, experimental art. Probably anyone who has an MFA from Yale went there in order to learn and study those methods - why would a student expect to learn representational drawing from teachers who didn't study it and don't make it?
What exactly was the advertised course description of this advanced drawing course that this student took? Did the teacher's methods fit the description? What is this school's overall approach to visual art? Was this course advertised as a course focused on representational art methods, or as an experimental, nontraditional, hybrid set of drawing methods?
The problem is probably that the student took a course that couldn't teach representational art while expecting that the course could (or should) accommodate it, and probably that the teacher or school didn't adequately communicate what the course's emphasis was going to be. I'd wager that the courses were not advertised as realist training and that that is not the teacher's specialty or what was being taught.
Greg,
The problem is that what you are describing as possible alternative curricula to that course, you are making sound as if such things would be OK and perhaps she just didn't realize it or wasn't careful enough when signing up.
I'm afraid there is no way that any such course could call itself "Advanced Drawing" and be anything but a fraud if the professor and the classwork planned was anything other than advanced drawing in much the way it would have been taught and intended to be taught in the academies of the 19th century, or the ateliers you can find on ARC's Approved listing of schools.
What you are describing as experimental, is something other than drawing and something other than a class that belongs in a department that advertises itself as the fine art department.
To say that "Yale has been one of the main graduate programs teaching nontraditional, experimental art" is no different than saying that Yale has permitted a pack of philistines to take control of its fine art department and do whatever they want in classes that they falsely advertise in order to give credibility and dignity to that which has neither.
In fact to permit such people to claim to be teaching graduate level drawing courses, is to degrade their art department, degrade their graduate department, degrade the entire university and its rich history, devalue the meaning of all degrees in art from their institution, generate reasonable skepticism about all degrees ever awarded by Yale in the fine arts in the past, present and future, and to willfully and publicly permit total fakery to take place on an on going basis; which lays out evidence as clear as a bell to all capable of removing a century of blinders, hypocrisy and abject failure, to see that any and all time, effort and money spent by parents and students in this direction they can be assured will go the way of the assets of all the fools so aptly described by the famous witticisms of P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain.
Fred
