Residency- Field Community School- 3 Hours
The students are continuing their projects on civil rights. Like before, the students worked on their projects most of the day, so I went from table to table asking them to tell me about what they have so far. A lot of the students were now working on their projects in teams, which was an aspect of the project I'd not been aware of until now. Something I had trouble with was if the students were goofing off instead of working, it didn't give me a lot to talk to them about.
After my session there, I talked with the teacher about possibilities for an upcoming lesson. We are thinking that I will teach a lesson in comics where the students will base their comics on folktales. The teacher pulled out her calendar and walked me through what she had planned for the rest of the year, and what gets changed and pushed around due to unforeseen circumstances. Being a teacher is a lot of planning.
Residency- Barton Open School- 5 Hours
The students are a little more than halfway through reading The Pearl. Like before, there were discussion questions regarding the book for them to answer within small groups. Today, there wasn't much discussion as a whole class. As much as I wanted to participate in their group discussions, I wasn't sure what to say because a lot of the questions were predictive questions and I've read the whole book.
In order to acquire more hours, I asked the teacher if I could start staying for her film studies classes from here on out, and she agreed. Right now they seem to be learning about film musicals. During the duration of the class, she showed the students a small handful of different clips and would ask them to compare and contrast, but mostly compare. Similar to how she teaches Language Arts, a lot of the learning seemed to be coming from the students answering questions, rather than her just lecturing and giving answers.
Shadowing- Urban Arts Academy- 3 Hours
When I walked in the first thing I saw was sheets of colored paper scattered around the floor. As it turns out, this was part of the warm-up exercise. The students were to play a real-world version of Candyland in which they are the pons moving across the board. It was really cute.
Today was Part 2 of the lesson from last week. However, I was not able to make it last week as I was out of town. While the students were working, I asked the teacher to give me context as to what the lesson was. It was a painting lesson. She said that last week the students had an assignment to create a still life using a palette knife as their only tool. This week, the students had freedom in what they could paint and what they could use as supplies. However, she encouraged the students to experiment and use the tools in ways they hadn't used them before. I always think it's a good idea to set up lessons like this--where first you learn the basics of the craft, and then as time goes on you gain the freedom to be more creative. As they say: You have to learn the rules before you can break them.
For the entrepreneurship section, the artist gave advice on how to network your art through social media. It was similar to what we've been talking about in my sophomore seminar class. One thing she said that I didn't know was that there are online tutorials on how to photograph your art well so it looks professional enough to post. I will have to look at these tutorials as that is something I am trying to get better at.