Johnson Elementary’s Kristi Hanco*ck sets welcoming tone in her art class (2024)

Kristi Hanco*ck’s art room at Bryan’s Johnson Elementary School is one where students can try, make mistakes, try again and use those “beautiful oops” to create something new.

“I love being in the art room, because everybody can be successful, no matter what,” she said.

She understands many of her students will not go on to pursue a career in art — and that is fine, the 20-year Bryan elementary school teacher said.

“If they just love it and if they can look at it and appreciate what someone else has made or how difficult something is or just be able to see beauty in other places, then I think that’s what an elementary art teacher is for,” she said. “Not necessarily teaching skills, just teaching how to do it, how to appreciate it, how to have a good time even if you’re not the best one.”

She did not start as an art teacher, though. She began her teaching career in 1995 at Crockett Elementary School as a kindergarten and first grade teacher, and taught the same at Johnson Elementary when she switched schools in 1999.

A native of Garrison, near Nacogdoches, Hanco*ck said she moved to Bryan-College Station in 1990 to enroll at Texas A&M, unsure of what to choose as her major. After taking a year off to care for her first child and her grandmother, who was battling cancer, she followed the advice of her high school English teacher and re-enrolled as an early education major.

After spending a few years in Johnson’s open-concept classrooms, she moved into the enclosed art room and decided she was never going back.

“I get to see them when they’re relaxed and happy, and nobody’s disappointed to come to art or scared to take a test in art, because there aren’t any,” she said. “I get to see them, I think, at their very best and enjoy them and get to know them.”

Though she misses seeing the first-graders learn to read, she said, she gets to see the students’ amazement at seeing how colors can be combined to create something new or how their pottery shines after drying.

Johnson Principal Amy Thomman called Hanco*ck “the heart of Johnson Elementary.”

“Talk about someone who has captured our hearts, it is that girl,” she said. “Her art room is one where you walk in, you smell immediately the smell of coffee and you just want to sit down. It’s home, and the students feel like that, too.”

Other teachers want to match her passion, Thomman said, and those relationships and connections Hanco*ck makes with her students is why many will name art as their favorite subject.

“She’s there for the person. She cares about all of us personally, and anytime you need just a shoulder to cry on — I know that sounds so cliché — or just a hug or just someone to just bring a smile to your face, you can just walk in her room, and instantly you feel that Hanco*ck love, and it’s absolutely indescribable,” Thomman said.

In the classroom, Hanco*ck said, her two favorite things are the units on colors and pottery. The most fun, though, is when she gets to try new things with the students and see what works.

Every time, she said, the students’ creations have more personality than her example because of their ideas and mistakes.

The ability to fail and try again is the most important lesson students can learn in art, Hanco*ck said.

“A mistake is not the end,” she said. “Sometimes, the mistake is the best thing that happens all day, and you end up with something really, really cool that you didn’t even imagine before. We call it a ‘beautiful oops.’ It’s an opportunity. It’s not the end.”

Hanco*ck advised anyone thinking of going into teaching to do it only if they love kids more than the idea of sharing knowledge or changing the future through their students.

“Life is tough on kids these days, and it’s just so important that they know that you love them or know that you like them. ... I think that you make the biggest impact with the way that you treat kids, and if they believe that you’re an adult that’s appropriate and kind and that you see good in them because some of them don’t see kind, appropriate adults that say anything positive to them or give them any kind of hope that things are going to be better for them in the future,” she said. “Sometimes we’re it: the nicest person that they see all day or the most trustworthy person that they see all day.”