HW for Thursday, January 28th

Blog about our discussion, your experience at City High, and a short summary of the readings.

Even though I hope to eventually read all of In the Making, I like the "Jigsaw" method we used to learn about the In the Making artists from pages 34-110. (I just learned about Jigsaw in my Middle School Curriculum and Methods class last semester, for those of you who don't know, it's just where you divide up the reading between students, who become "experts" on their section and share what they discovered with the rest of the class so that everyone can become "experts.") This way, if we heard about an artist who sounded interesting, we could go back on our own and read about him/her, or look them up online. And it was nice to discuss the artists in class in addition to on our blogs because there is a good chance that not all of us read every single one of our classmates blogs.

My experience at ABCDEF High was a great one! I have done two semesters of practicums in high school Spanish classes, and have taught Elementary Spanish since October, so it is so nice to be in an art room again! Very refreshing and fun! My high school didn't have potter's wheels - so cool that this high school does! Another cool thing about ABCDEF High for me is the diversity since I went to a small rural school and only had about 150 kids in my graduating class. My group of four students decided to go with a black, white, silver, and red graduation themed cake complete with photos, a yearbook, scroll, and cap with tassels to complete their three tiers and pedestal platter, that is unless plans changed Wednesday when they met. The three girls in my group got into designing more than the boy did. I think he may have a bit of "senioritis" going on but we'll see if things are different tomorrow, maybe he was just tired or not having the best day?

Something I really liked from Chapter 2 of Fires in the Bathroom was on page 33 - a student shared that her teacher had the students write for homework one night about how they would teach a history class if they were teachers. And another student's teacher gave students a topic, and they had to research it, make a lesson plan, and teach it. I think both of these are great ideas that I want to do in my own classroom in the future. My 7th grade English teacher had us do this and I remember thinking it would be so easy - we'd just do some practice sentences from the textbook and give candy to whoever got the answers right. I don't know what grade my partner and I earned, but I remember we were finished way too fast, and no one understood the concept when we were done teaching it to our peers. And using sentences from a textbook was so unoriginal of us! I think a lesson our teacher was trying to get across with this assignment was that teaching isn't as easy as it looks. And I don't think it was until college that I realized that teachers aren't just robots, that they actually have lives outside of school just students do - families, friends, hobbies, pets, etc.

Many of the projects in Chapter 2 of From Ordinary to Extraordinary reminded me of projects I have done in the past. In Crafts in high school I once took little cappuccino cups and painted Chinese characters onto them and then elevated their saucers with bent spoons. The soda cans project reminded me of an scarecrow we made in elementary school out of litter we found around the school grounds - recycling at its finest! The soda can insect also reminded me of a ladybug garden stake I bought for a friend at the Holiday Thieves Market - did anyone else see those back in December? The Number 2 pencils project reminded me of a drawing I did in art as a middle schooler - we divided our papers into four sections and drew a tool or other random found object in the first box, and in the forth box we drew an animal that was shaped similarly to the object. In the 2nd and 3rd boxes we drew what the morphed object would have looked like during the in between stages. Mine was a wrench morphed into a tropical bird. The Creative Food project reminded me of winter dinner party invitations I made in Photography in high school. The table and chairs on my family's deck at home were covered in snow so I took a bunch of contrasting dishes, silverware, glasses, mugs, etc. outside and set up the table (no food) and took black and white photos for the front of the winter dinner party invitations I made. Still don't think my mom has used them haha. I wish I had pictures of some of these old assignments to post!