Week 15

Today was an especially fun day because today was the staff Christmas party at Pinheads bowling alley! I had such a great time socializing with the art department and other teachers outside of the context of school. Our department really sucked at bowling, but we had a great time taking selfies with different Snapchat filters and playing games. The perfect way to end my semester!

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During the school day, students were finishing up their slab projects in Ceramics 1. I helped explain that they need to pace how fast their objects dry when they finish and the benefits to and strategies to bagging certain parts of their pieces that are more fragile and could crack. Their tile projects turned out great! I graded a few for Ms. O to get a little bit of her workload lightened.

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Intro to 3D was still in the middle of their art history unit. Students were assigned a work of art from an art period or movement and asked to present 5-10 facts about the artwork to the rest of the class. I appreciated that Ms. O asks them not to include dates because she wants them to focus on main ideas and concepts expressed in the periods and movements, not dates. Other things I would add to the guidelines would be that the facts cannot include the name of the artist or something generic and obvious like "It was made of marble." The medium could count as half a fact. I just noticed that some students didn't go in depth into the research to find the really interesting, weird, not widely known facts, even though it wasn't a super intensive research project. I also think I would spread art history throughout the semester instead of at the very end. Like maybe a lecture every other Friday, because a week straight of lecture is a little hard, especially the week before finals.

The paper projects turned out great! It was interesting because they really struggled grasping the idea of layering the paper at the beginning and it was almost maddening how many had questions and just had no idea where to start. Ms. O asked them what she could've done better to explain it because she had them do planning activities and demonstrated it three separate times, but they said it really had nothing to do with her instruction, rather it was just something they had to try and figure out as they went.

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I'm super excited for what next semester brings and thankful to be working with such awesome people at Fishers!