ok. so it was done about 2 weeks ago. but hey, i’m lazy and have been catching up on sleep. ok. not really, i also started teaching summer school.
some things that i learned over the school year…
1. i need to be better about making my lessons less daunting in terms of concepts and meaning-making, or at least making it so that students are able to find what they want to say because they want to say it, and not because i want them to make it. because so much of my personal work is about personal reflection, i think i have a tendency to want my students to achieve the same amount of meaning in their work. i have to remember that most of my students aren’t going to be artists and that i should allow for that, but also be able to give them a valuable art-making experience.
2. i have to stay on top of working with students who have learning disabilities and be able to direct those students in a more welcoming and understanding manner. not that i was mean or anything, but i recognize that many of these students will need a little more direction and support than students who may not need help.
3. students who are lazy and unwilling to participate need to be identified and more efficiently managed. whether its by removing them from the class or if they need to be held more accountable with appropriate consequences, i need to be more conscious and better equipped mentally. i had too many students that i feel i allowed to remain in the class when it was clear that they had no intention of participating appropriately in my class which led to a lot of wasted time and effort for me, as well as to other students who were more deserving of my attention.
4. the zine project needs to be seriously evaluated, if not removed from my curriculum. i really liked the concepts and ideas, and i hope that my students learned how to use Adobe Photoshop, but in the end, i think that it was way too much and too frustrating, both technically and conceptually. i need to either break it down and make it a project that has smaller blocks of time spent on it over the year, or just make it a group project where each student provides a page to the zine.
5. more technique needs to be taught. i need to focus more on the how-to, but also need to be better at the why?
k. here are some photos of some of my students work.
papercutting was a lesson based on the work of Peter Callesen, Jen Stark, and Patrick Gannon. Students were asked to recreate/re-tell a story or myth.
“diaristic” or emotion based drawing using pastels. for this work, we looked at the work Edgar “Heap of Birds” Hachivi.
peace.
