SAN JOSE, CALIF.—   “I like Silver Creek as a school and I really like the community; I think it’s a good mix of people. It’s not all one group and I really like that it’s very diverse,” Silver Creek Crafts and Art 1 teacher Alyssa Imai says about her job. 

“I actually decided in high school I’ve always loved working with people. Collaboration is my first big love and then I feel like I do not want to do math, english [or] anything else. I loved art so why not work with art for other people.” Her passion can be traced back to her early childhood where she always loved creating things and making things with her grandma. “I will always like to doodle and draw and I was like you know this is something I want to do for the rest of my life.” Through her unorthodox teaching styles, her passionate personality and her encouraging demeanor, Imai inspires her students to awaken the artistic soul within themselves and to chase their artistic ventures. Her recent projects have included “yarn bombing” where students have built crocheted pieces they installed around the U-building on Silver Creek campus, original crafted string doll characters, and chairs supporting someone 18 inches off the ground with the use of flimsy materials like paper.

One of Imai’s favorite parts about art is how subtly it plays such a huge role in our everyday lives. It teaches her to take notice of every little thing more. “So art is a lot about training your eyes to see things and to notice things so when I go out in my everyday life, that’s one of the biggest impacts is that I am looking more, I am proceeding more at the world as it actually is instead of just kind of like autopilot: That’s a tree I know what a tree is, it’s like what does that specific thing look like.”

Imai believes artistic innovation has roots in both talent and hard work. She believes people can have an “eye” and understand things right off the bat whereas it takes time to develop the skills on top of that. She fully believes with practice and collaboration, one will learn those skills without a doubt. “I believe it’s 100% something you will learn and you learn from people around you.” It’s important Imai inspires her students to think originally, which she finds a very valuable skill people possess. One learning principle she lives by is, “… giving yourself space to learn, giving yourself a space to fail and be bad at something and then be like ‘okay what do I learn, how do I get better at that?’”

Imai recognizes the challenges and frustration with building things that don’t quite look the way we envision them to. “100% because this is perfectionism this is our perfectionism talk where your brain is like this is a beautiful shiny idea and then reality kicks in and you’re like it wasn’t, there’s not the magical connections that I assumed in my brain.” Her advice is to understand a first draft won’t turn out like what you imagined it to be. Because of this, she advises those to continue creating drafts of their vision until their product starts to match the vision, acknowledging it could really take 10 drafts.

She’s developed some of her crafts skills through real world experiences with people that use it. “One of my favorite things I learned from my dad is that if I want to learn to do something, help someone out who does it, so a lot of my like handy crafty skills are from helping other people do what they do.”

Imai is always looking to improve her teaching. She wants to make sure that her teaching will be applicable to students beyond school. ”I think one of the things I got frustrated with in school is that a lot of the things I learned I didn’t feel like were applicable outside of school, so I’m always trying to see relevancy and push towards what’s going on down in the world which is always changing, and also just I want to make sure that things are relevant to different groups of people.”

She is optimistic about future projects. “I’m always changing things up. My dream project that I [hope] will one day happen is I would like for crafts to build a mini golf course. I think it’ll be a lot of fun.”