When I was asked to write a blog for the Corning Museum of Glass “Explainers,” I started thinking about what topics I would choose to discuss. I pulled from my newspaper experience to help me determine many different subjects, all related to the job of an Explainer. I thought of everything from the “Ask Me” buttons we wear and signs on the carts to disastrous tours and “newbie” training sessions. But then I realized for my first blog, I should just keep it simple and stay true to my job title. I need to explain to you about Explainers.
The Explainer program began in 2005 with roughly eight people holding the title. The employee list has now grown to include about 30 names each year. I volunteered during that first summer, along with another current Explainer, and the two of us have been hooked ever since. Even though we are the only ones from that original year left, each year, we get a new crew of excited high schoolers, eager to learn and share their knowledge of glass.
Explainers have many jobs around the museum, but when it comes right down to it, an Explainer is someone who knows a lot of information about the museum and shares it with our visitors from all over the world. Explainers go through a rigorous training program, which when I started, spanned the entire school year, but is now broken up into two shorter sessions. We are trained in the glass collection galleries so we are able to answer practically any puzzling question a visitor might ask.
All our training arms us with knowledge to be employed at the museum during July and August, the busiest tour season. During those summer months, Explainers man hands-on carts in the galleries, which provide visitors with an up-close-and-personal look at the glass they see in the cases. There are seven carts, ranging in topic from ancient glass to caneworking. Techniques, methods, and even a little chemistry are discussed, and those who come up to the carts leave with knowledge they otherwise might not have gained.
To see amazement on faces when you explain how a bundle of glass rods was fused and stretched to create a very small rod with a tiny pattern in the middle is both extraordinary and rewarding. To know you’ve provided an understanding of glass that a visitor might not get from reading the labels, for me, takes the “job” part out of my work, and just makes me grateful to have been there to help people learn.
Having worked at CMoG for four summers, with that extra summer of volunteering thrown in, I have learned which carts I like and exactly how to explain them, so I get the most information across in the best way possible. I have watched countless reactions to the game played on the American cart. “Do you know the difference between cut and pressed glass?” People who originally answer no, leave my cart feeling successful for having done so well discerning the hand-cut pieces on the cart from those made in a mold, and even wander to nearby cases to see if they can tell the difference again.
More to come…
~Kim Price
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