COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop)

Something that really gets me excited about using technology in the classroom is the ability to show students so many creative and artful videos like this one. Today I began a lesson with fifth graders on actual and implied movement and was able to share with them the video on Kinetic Sculpture that I posted here a while back. It was so exciting to be able to see them get so excited over this great video. I simply asked them to tell me a few things that they observed in the video and the complexity of their thoughts and level of interest and intrigue blew me away.

This was a really good day for me. The lessons that I taught today were all "day 2"s for my original lessons and it was really exciting to see how much the kids had learned based both on their memories from last week and also in their continued engagement in the assignments. Today was also the first day that the students started using "real clay," which is a opportunity that makes them feel very grown up and artisticallly "official," if you will. There is something instantly gratifying in seeing students genuinely enjoying and doing well at an activity that you have poured so much of yourself into preparing. And it is exciting to see my own ideas being given new life through the creative genius of children. Somehow, the more I work with children, the more I am amazed at what they come up with. Just watching 24 six-year old decorate tiles shaped like houses today reminded me of how much creative potential lies in one person and how unique each person's vision is.

I think as I teach more, I seeing that perhaps the thing that I enjoy most about teaching art is that I get to look at great art all day long. I just adore walking around the classroom and seeing what the students come up with in response to a single prompt or idea. I love looking at so many different kinds of art, and what could be better than looking at over 100 pieces of brand new art being created each day? It is truly a wonderful thing.

Sunday afternoon physics

It is getting on towards Sunday afternoon and I find myself contemplating heat, calories, and projectile motion. I've been sitting at a new coffee shop, looking out at the faces of Boulder walking down the street outside the large plate-glass window for nearly three hours and am rummaging around inside my body and brain for the energy and perseverance to keep going. I need an activity for fifth graders tomorrow that will help them understand the concept of movement in a work of art. I have a large stack of lesson plans, essays, rubrics, assessment tables, and analysis to do and I am looking outside wondering if it would be okay for me to get up and take a break, to go to Bliss, one of my favorite stores and look at all the creative, artistic gifts and things that they lay out for me to admire.

I am on the downward slope of this journey. The acceleration is increasing exponentially each day and I am coming to that point where many of those loose pieces are falling into place. Things are making more sense and my desire to do well is becoming more and more pervasive. I am beginning to see how I can, in this strange season, take charge of the sort of teacher I want to be and move towards it.

A month or so ago, I remember sitting at my kitchen table on a Sunday much like this one, feeling angry about the seven hours spent pouring over books and completing the tedium that is the "Art Content Lesson Plan Format." I wanted to be outside, making myself a well-rounded person, engaging in the rest that gives me the right to claim my own humanity. The next few days brought a well of tears and a reminder to be myself, to be personal, to move my teaching out of my head, out of Microsoft Word formatting, into my arms, my voice, my stories. And although this was an important step, I was still missing the balance between intentional planning and hard and fast commitment to something that is still all-consuming.

Something about my new placement at the elementary level, maybe my mid-term evaluation, maybe a simple progression towards a more "grown up" perspective, I am more resigned to putting in the work that it takes to be a really great teacher. A lot of days earlier in this semester left me feeling far from the teacher I want to be for reasons I am still sorting out. But I feel now that I've had more time to organize my thoughts, more of a space that gives me a conceptual grounding of what I am about, that I can set down these goals and follow the path towards realizing them.

I want to be a great teacher. I want students to come away with deep thoughts, substantial changes in their view of learning and life. I want to be intentional about the activity that takes place in my classroom and I want students to walk away with a grasp of the concepts about art and the world that make me see my life as a journey towards the center of the earth. And I want to do the work today that will make me that teacher.

It is easy for me to complain, to say "it isn't fair," or get upseet that the constructs of our over-busy society are doing damage to my personal life. I can say that college is perpetuating a society that is overworked and overly committed to success as a result of production. And although these things may be true at the end of the day, I am being called to a race at this moment that demands everything. This week, my cooperating teacher reminded me that this trial, this last step is a process that is intended to put me through the paces so that when the greater challenges come and I am outside this support system, I will have the muscles to lift it all. And yes, I will have a great deal to learn for the duration of my life as a teacher, but the intention here is truly to benefit the students under my care. And although, mid-stream, it is easy to say that those in authority over me lack perspective or they have failed to see me, I have to remember that thier goals may be different, their perspective is coming from a place other than mine and I must trust that thier motives are pure and right.

It is this strange place between submission and self-realization. It is this moment in which I am being told, "you must be a teacher like this," and it is also a landscape in which I must daily ask myself, "What kind of teacher do I ultimately want to be and what am I willing to submit to in orde to get there?"

Some parts of me wish that perhaps I could go back to the beginning, knowing what I know now, and try things again with more of the end in mind. I wish I had set out first with this question of "how do I want to grow as a teacher" and go back in the environment of support and mentorship that I had earlier in the semester and try it again. But I think this is the thing that time, learning, and perspective provides-- the ability to move forward knowing that the opportunity is still mine. Perhaps this is the beauty of living the life of a teacher-- there are always opportunities to build upon our own learning. There is never an expectation of mastery, but always an expectation of openness to the voids that must be filled in our understanding of what it means to teach.

And so, this afternoon, as the sun streams is across my dusty glasses and I long to get up and leave, I will persevere yet. I will finish this race set before me and work on remembering that the reward of seeing myself as a teacher who lives well will be greater than the momentary rewards of a free weekend of afternoon of less meaningful fulfillment.

I will finish this race and I will continue to run it well.

Child Artists

Here is a great article written by George Szekely, who was also the keynote speaker at the CAEA Conference this year. He has a great way of honoring the innate power of a child's creativity and his words keep us from the belief that children are lesser contributors to our world.

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Seriously...

This week has been quite a doosey. After a weekend full of angst over how much work I am expected to do over the weekend, a panic attack over my online class that is quickly getting out of control, and a Sunday composed of a collection of busy work, laundry, and facebook updates displaying an array of curse-words, I entered the week thinking about how to get a ridiculously long lesson plan ready to hand to my university supervisor before she watched me make art look like torture for 24 high school students and then meet me in Fort Colins to sit through a 45 minute talk on student law that I probably could have conducted on my own via the wonders of google before driving the hour and a half back home, during which I realized that Ihad no idea what I wouldbe doing in class on Wednesday. Come Wednesday then, my mentor teacher ventured to ask what I might possibly do to make my teaching the least bit motivating and engaging. After a full planning period of me balling my eyes out in the photo lab, we came to the conclusion that the answer to all of this is simply to stop.

So many people have been telling me that student teaching is essentially a load of bullshit that one must muddle through in order to get to the stage in teaching life that you actually begin to learn how to do it. The terms, "jumping through hoops," "busy work," and "the worst part of life" have begun to ring with sparking clarity these past few weeks for me. i've done my fair share of thinking and reflecting on which end of the meaningful living to wasting time on the "stuff you have to do" spectrum I ought to reside during this period of my life and the truth is that in all integrity, the running far from the wasteful crap area of the scale is what I would prefer. I have a strong aversion to giving into the pressure of waiting to do meaningful things in life until that glorious later. For many years of my young life, I've been dreaming of the day that I'll be a real teacher, dreaming of the day that I get to hang out with kids all day and make art, and now that I am in the place in my life where that dream is so so close to a reality, it is frustrating that the very institution that sets out to give people this dream is the very thing keeping me from the very stuff that makes one consider dreaming such a wonderful thing.

One way or the other, I still have choices to make for my own life, my own actions, my own attitude, and I've found it neccesary to revisit the all-to familiar lessons that have been making up the stuff of my life for a while now.

Being the self-reflective person that I am, I know that when I get to a place of feeling overly-pressured about how I spend my time and energies, I become crippled by the all-too- great sense of seriousness of these actions. The artistic growing up that I went through under the care of the painting department at CSU brought me through the fire of figuring out how seriously I should take myself as a member of said artistic community. By the end of mty time as an art student, I realized that, given my perceptibilty of internalizing too many things, I'd been influenced into living my life based on an assumption that ones' worth in the grand scheme is determined by a ability to find worth in the "almighty they" of the art community. Worth is defined by the percent of ones' soul sold to overworking the self. I somehow got tricked into thinking that the more posturing, the less heartfelt connection and enjoyment to life would result in happiness and success in life as an artist.

And I am realizing that perhaps that thinking has also somehow got muddled up with my approach to teaching. The conversation I found myself engaged in with my mentor teacher between streams of tears brought me to the realization that my students cannot see me as a person who cares for them as people when I am caught up in a system that is asking me to give more value to aligned objectives and assessment methods than the authenticity of a life well lived. And perhaps in my left-brained, performance-based approach to life is allowing me to get carried away with things that are not meant to carry us away. But either way, I am finding myself in a battle of determing how to be true to my own values rather than my perceptions of other people's expectations. And maybe a part of the apprehension is an all-too poignant awareness of the role these people and their expectations play in my ability to get out into the real world and live this life of a teacher totally apart from them. I am afraid that if I begin to live it now, I'll not be allowed to fully embrace the autonomy of "doing it my way" later.

So, this morning, stting at a new favorite haunt, breathing in the wonderful fall air, I wrote down a few good thoughts that I want to live by as I complete this course:

1. Although objectives, assessments, methods, and rubrics are important in thier own right, they are an underlying structure and should be second only to the heart of really what is going on when we come together as people in a classroom.

2. How can I teach my students about living from the heart if I can't find the space to be able to teach from mine?

3. My mentor teacher told me something very good on wednesday. She said, "Heidi, you know all of this stuff-- you know everything about teaching and you know everything about yourself, but you can't seem to figure out how to live it out." Her assertion of this reminded me of the freedom that we do have in simply living out who we really are. As as person who is still a student under the authority of instructors with a role of making all the things I still lack clear to me, it has become easy for me to search for an external "fix" to "doing things right." I rarely find the space to practice just living out what I already am. When I began studying art education four and half years ago, I approached it with the goal of becomming a person full of the things that a teacher has inside of them so that teaching is as simple as being myself. And now, here I am, teaching, but forgetting this idea. Or perhaps not believing that I yet have it in me to do it because I am still being asked to write it out in page after page. I'm still being asked to intellectualize rather than simply do it and do it well.

so, here's to fleshing it out. I've decided this week to stop going through the motions of intellectualizing everything and simply making it my one and only priority to just DO IT. And for the first two days of my student teaching exeprience, I am having a blast!

Rembrandt Autobiography

I'm working on developing a unit on shading, texture and value, and came across this nice video on Rembrandt.

Yesterday marked the end of my fifth week at Silver Creek. I am more than half done with my secondary placement and big chunks of my brain are hoping that elementary will be less pressure, more fun. This not to say that high school is not fun and that I am not enjoying it, but I miss the easy acceptance of my elementary kids from BASE Camp. High School management seems to revolve around attitudes, boredom, and legal issues and it is exhausting trying to sort all that out on top of simply learning how to instruct.

Last week I came to a turning point. Perhaps it s simply in part due to my getting the hang of things or starting to teach my own lessons. But I came to this place of realizing how much of my activity centered around all that I had to do. Rather than thinking about what it takes to really get kids hooked, what I need to do to get them interested and learning, I was thinking about how to meet all of the requirements of students teaching. I have been so focused and stressed about filling out paperwork and completing lesson plans with everything worded and measurable that the thought of connecting with my students felt like one more task, one more thing that my overloaded brain needed to work out.

But over the last week, I've been rearranging my priorities. I've decided that if yesterday was the last day that I had to teach, the last day I had to be in contact with these kids, I would want to make sure that they had a meaningful experience with art. The question of whether or not I had every objective lined out clearly was not high on my list of priorities.

Now, I realize that I am still in the place where I am being tested and that I am being asked to submit to the authority charged with the task of awarding me my lisence. And I realize that they are always under the responsibility to submit to the requirements of the state and that these are the tasks that I must complete to move to the next step in my practice as a teacher. But I do not want to waste the time that I have in contact with thess young people still under my care, despite all of the other things that I must do. I am reminded that if I seek the things that are true and right and best, all the rest, the nitty gritty, will come together as well.

As the week came to an end,even though my sleep level was well below acceptable levels most days, I began to notice more and more kids greeting me in the hallways, excited to see me, wanting to share thier lives with me. I am seeing those relationships begin to grow and flourish. As I observe the ways that I interact with the students, I see that my conversations are less connected to my stress level or an assumed sense of responsibility and more connected with a desire to really be personal and genuine. I want them to know me-- and I learning to be more comfortable with that line between teacher and friend becoming less fragile. This not to say that I am throwing that sense of professionalism out the window, but allowing myself to be a person to them rather than working on maintinaing a staunch position as AUTHORITY. And this is the place where I am finding myself as a teacher. And I am beginning to see in myself the qualities that I admire the most in the teachers that have inspired me to teach.