Week 7

Today was great! I bought a new teacher outfit so I was feeling myself, the weather was great, and the kids were fantastic :)

Ms. O is coordinating the graduation ceremony so she had to go to Lucas Oil this morning and left the class in my charge. There was a substitute there since I'm still working on getting my sub license, but Ms. O told her to just let me lead class. This was a fantastic opportunity because now kids were forced to come to me for help since I was the only art teacher in the room. This really gave me the chance to show them that I can help them with their projects and that they can come to me too if Ms. O is busy instead of waiting on her to get done. I just felt like a real life teacher and it felt natural and made me really happy. The kids really enjoyed it too because I think they opened up more and got to know me better. I feel like I'm finally over the hump because I realized that of course I want my students to like me but I don't NEED them to approve of me. So I just felt a surge of confidence today. I had a lot of interesting conversations with them today. I wrote more about them in todays NOTES. I think the sweetest moment of the day though was when D., a student Ms. O previously had who comes in during his lunch hour to hang out, came in and saw she was gone. He said he wanted to read his book to her. It was a national geographic book about the four seasons written for Kindergarteners. I said he could read it to me! So he read me the book, which was only four sentences long, but he had to describe the pictures in it and create his own "stories" for a few of them. As he was reading I understood that he was an ENL student (Ms. O confirmed later that day) and after he finished reading I said he did great and he said "I know, I'm really proud!" and I told him he should be. Literally so sweet. He then went to a classmate and read the book for her.

Ms. O came back during lunch and I told her about my day and she was glad I was able to take charge. During 5th hour, AP and Drawing 4 just had work time. I told one girl who literally looked like she hadn't done a thing to her drawing since last week that she was being to careful and precious with her art and that she needs to just let loose and make confident marks on the page and deal with them later if their wrong because you won't know if they're wrong if you're too afraid of "messing up" what you already have. I just want her to get to the actual meat of her project because she's been working on drawing a brick wall background for the past two weeks. Yikes! I think Ms.O's method of assigning a due date midway through the project may be contributing to this slowness because they're not even halfway done and they've had plenty of time already. I see the pros to assigning the due date when the class hits the halfway mark because then you can see the pace of how they work and make sure they have sufficient time to finish their work, but it negatively affects the pacing too. I don't know. Other highlights for the day include observing another temporary sub who just graduated from Ball State and seeing how she was doing getting into the swing of things as a recent graduate. I think she's more of an artist than a teacher though. Like I saw a difference in the student's faces when I interacted with them vs. when she did. I think she just kind of has a monotone voice and isn't very expressive whereas I'll exclaim "This looks awesome!" or "I love how you did this!" and they'll be excited to talk to me. Just different teaching styles I guess! She has a lot of cool ideas though, which I took notes on. Lastly, Ms. Osborne's ceramics class made these incredible wind chimes for a project! I just love that she has them thinking about and making other objects in ceramics other than pots or cups.

Then during the last period of the day, one student crossed the line a bit when he was talking about a girl he made a prom-posal for and how Ms. O helped him make the sign. Then he said “well I found out she was a hoe when she said I shouldn’t catch feelings after I gave up my virginity to her.” Ms O and I were like “whoaaaaaa.” Ms. O said “I don’t want to hear that ever!” and walked away. And he was like “I thought I told you! Sorry you’re just so real with us!” then I said “I’ll get real with you if you want. You should not be making those kinds of decisions unless you are able to handle the consequences or can totally prevent the consequences from happening. Understand me?” and he said “yeah.” So I’m not opposed to being real and not acting like kids aren’t having sex or pretend like waiting until marriage is the only “option.” He appreciated what I had to say and maybe that will help in in future situations.

Today was seriously the best day I have had in mentorship yet and I am excited for next week!

In terms of my personal life, I am very conflicted about how my mom's resignation will affect my future. I won't be able to use Mr. Spradling as a reference because I have no idea if he'll be professional or be mad and I don't want to risk it and that job with concord is the only real job experience I have working with kids. So I have to put my mom down as my reference, which is technically true since she did supervise me daily, but I feel that it weakens my resume. Then, I really don't want to stop working with my kids in color guard at Concord, but I feel that it has become too hostile of an environment for me to comfortably work there during the summer. So I'm looking for other color guard positions around the area and it makes me really sad. Last year I literally ran the color guard and now I'm leaving it in the hands of some stranger. I just feel like I'm losing something I really built there. So that sucks. These are just some of my selfish feelings while my mom is dealing with way bigger issues. It's just all sad. But looking forward to a possible future with Fishers makes me happy.