Greenwood HS Visit

Today I visited Greenwood High School. There were only two art teachers at this school, one 2D and one 3D. Mr. Frahm taught ceramics and Ms. Foster taught 2D art. Mr. Frahm was a fun teacher, he had a good sense of humor and a good classroom atmosphere. His kids were working on coil pots, which is a pretty basic project for a beginning ceramics class, but he spiced it up by incorporating art history. So they looked at different vessel forms that would have been made with the coil method back in ancient times, then had students select a form and replicate its proportions. I think that was a much better way of approaching a basic level of clay building because students had to think about how different parts of the vessel related to other parts proportionally and recognize different shapes that were characteristic of different locations in the world that were all simultaneously using the coil method without having communicated with each other. I liked that. I took more extensive notes on my day HERE. I also visited Ms. Foster's Advanced 2D class and it was exciting because she was doing a project based on the artist Vik Muniz, who just recently had an artist talk at IU that I attended and whose work is displayed in the IU Art Museum right now! She was really excited to have someone who had met him be able to talk to her students. Their project was to create a portrait of someone famous using found or recycled objects. They all looked great and it was fun because the objects they used really enhanced the portrait. Like one girl used broken CD's for her portrait of P!nk and another used all sequins for her portrait of the drag queen RuPaul. It was just cool to see them understand that medium does effect the overall meaning of a piece. They also were working on assembling pages of a coloring book they had created to donate to the fire department for families who may have lost everything in a fire. Ms. Foster says she generally tries to incorporate one community service project into her curriculum per semester. I like that a lot. I don't think I enjoyed this visit as much as I would of because I had Fishers HS still stuck in my head the whole day. I love two teachers there and I love both the subject areas they teach so I'm having a difficult time thinking of which one I want to ask to be my mentor, but I think I definitely am going back this semester and observe them both one more time before I select one to observe for the full day. The drive is worth it for me and I have family that lives in Noblesville so I'm sure they wouldn't mind if I drove up the night before to spend the night then go to Fishers in the morning on Fridays. As of now though, I am going to KDPi's iLead conference at U of Indy tomorrow, which is just a professional development opportunity for students to become future teacher leaders. I think it should be fun! And then over Thanksgiving Break I am going to observe Mrs. Amador, a junior high art teacher at Concord that I've heard AMAZING things about. This one is just for fun, but I am really enjoying visiting so many different schools. I feel like I've done a good job getting out there and experiencing a variety of art classrooms! I am working on my 3rd and 4th expectations that I will turn in after Thanksgiving. Then I'll probably wait to complete the 5th one for Spring 2017 before applying to the TEP. I think I'm doing a solid job of getting SP's on my expectations, so I think waiting for the 5th one until the beginning of spring semester wouldn't be a problem (let me know if you think otherwise).