Week 5

Another great day with Fishers! Ceramics 1 is working on their tile project. Ms. O and Osborne decided to have them do a practice tile through a collaborative project. On the board was a big sheet of paper with a grid and then a projected image of cells. So students selected a grid section

and traced the design of their square and will create a ceramic tile of it. In the end, all the tiles will be grouted together as a single piece for the auction at the cancer gala in the spring (a big fundraising event in conjunction with their dance marathon for riley's). I like how this project is allowing students practice but also going towards a good cause. Definitely a good community outreach project I could see myself doing in my future teaching. It also serves as a great assessment tool so we can see what mistakes or troubles students are running into or share successes with the rest of the class before moving onto the final tile project.

I subbed for second period while Ms. O participated in a socratic seminar for an AP where she was supposed to have a conversation about the removal of the confederate statues with an ethics teacher in front of AP students. I honestly wouldn't have agreed to do it if I were here because they just invited her to speak yesterday and gave her a list of a hundred questions that the students were to pick from, but half a day's notice is not sufficient time to prepare. She said it didn't go as bad as she thought it would though. I would've liked to sit in on that, but I appreciated the opportunity to run the class on my own! I managed to keep the classroom on task and focused without being annoying. I had to demonstrate to each of the tables how to reclaim clay, so the first time I demonstrated and then I brought the next group up and a student from the previous group had stayed to reclaim her own clay for the project so I had her demo it to the next group. Then I had two guys from that group demo for the next group. I think the students that got to demo really enjoyed that because it was an opportunity to demonstrate a skill to their peers which develops confidence in my opinion. Plus peers like learning from their peers, it's more engaging and fun!

During prep I talked to Ms. O and Osborne about the wheel unit and some questions I had before I could move forward with planning. They are super open to me making it whatever I want so that's really encouraging. Ms. Osborne even invited me to teach her section as well!

Then right before lunch we had to evacuate the building due to a bomb threat. It was interesting because my reaction was like "geez, a stupid bomb threat" because in my high school we got like four bomb threats a year. One week we even had three days in a row of threats. So I wasn't worried at all. But the teachers were freaked out. Apparently the last time they had a threat or evacuated due to a threat was over 15 years ago. So we evacuated to the football field. There were interesting conversations about whether or not it was best to evacuate everyone to the football field because technically you're consolidating a massive student population into an easier target than if they were all spread out in the school, but I don't know the reasons behind those decisions. It only lasted about 20 minutes before we were allowed back in. It had been one of a multitude of threats all over the area and apparently it's a technique called "swatting." Where you send forces here and there and all over the place to distract from something else. So everything was fine though. I think they'll have to rethink evacuation because there was massive gridlock getting students out only two entrances. They should've treated it like a fire drill, have everyone head to the nearest exit and then meet at the football field. But that could get hectic. I don't know. Just questions I have.

The rest of the day went smoothly. I introduced the next project for AP 2D/Drawing and then helped check sketches for Intro to 2D classes.

Here's an amazing piece being worked on by one of the AP students! It inspires me to make a huge self portrait too!