Moving right along. In today’s ‘cast, I ramble on about:
Academic Aesthetic 168: Quarter End Reflections [ 12:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1121)Today I teach my last classes of the Quarter, so as I reflect on the first 9 weeks I’ve asked my students to do the same.
Next quarter will be different. Why? Because it has to be.
Oh, and the programming language I couldn’t remember? Scratch.
Want to know a secret? A deep, dark secret that I’ve kept off this blog for over a year now? One that will shock you?
Well, too bad. I’m going to tell you anyway.
Ready?
Here I go …
I’m not a part of my school’s Art Department.
Yeah, that shocks me, too. Here’s a guy whose screen name on an umptillion of Web 2.0 sites is “The Art Guy,” who may or may not have been the first art teacher podcaster (at the time I started I couldn’t find another one … that’s far from the case now of course), who isn’t even a part of his own school’s Art Department.
It’s a bureaucratic issue, to be honest. I teach in a computer lab in a K-8 Arts Academy. If it was a high school, I’d be a Computer Graphics teacher. Unfortunately there is no course number for such a class in middle school, let alone elementary.
Instead, I teach a class called Technology Concepts. It’s a fun class to teach, if you’re as geeky as I am, but it’s not inherently an art course. Therefore, I have no reason (on paper, at least), to be a part of the Art Department. Instead, I’m a part of the Enrichment Department.
I recently was chatting online with a former coworker from a previous school, and she lamented my change of departments.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, “You’re far too talented to not be teaching art!”
At that point I puffed out my chest and my head swelled with pride – and not just because she said I had talent.
“Oh, I’m still teaching art. Do you honestly think I could stop teaching art if I tried?”
Of course she could not.
Your definitions may vary, but in my book, ART is anything that involves creativity. I don’t care if it’s a painting, story, play, song, dance, or video game. An ARTIST is anyone who creates art, and an ART TEACHER is anyone who teaches students how to be artists.
I’m a teacher at a Creative & Performing Arts Academy. Whatever subject is taught by any teacher, they had darned well better be teaching art as well or they don’t belong there.
Math is art.
Science is art.
Social studies is art.
Reading/Language Arts is art to the point that the R/LA Department should be part of the Art Department as well!
Does it sting a bit to know I’m not part of a department named for my degree and certification? Yes, yes it does. But it doesn’t change what I teach.
Art is universal. Only the styles and media change.
And I’m an art teacher.
School starts on Monday.
No, no that’s not true. For me, School started several weeks ago when I came in during the Summer to put my lab back together. (The custodial staff needed me to break it down so they could move the desks and wax my floors.)
I found out only recently that many of the students I had last year will also be returning. I met this news with mixed feelings. First, I had some awesome kids last year. There was more than one time that I took student work to my principal and said “This is why I need majors.” Seriously, we’re an Arts Academy. We have dance, drama, visual art, chorus, media production, band, AND orchestra majors – why not computer graphics, too?
That may happen in the future, but for now the red tape is in the way.
Unfortunately, for every student who was absolutely thrilled to have my class there was another who was only there because the Guidance dept. needed to give them an elective.
I don’t fault students for not being thrilled with technology. It’s my passion, it doesn’t have to be everyone’s. I was, however, concerned about credit. There have been two other occasions where I’ve had students put in a class after they had already earned credit. In one case discipline problems were a concern.
But then again, I’ve been assured that if the students couldn’t get credit for taking Technology Concepts a second time the scheduling software wouldn’t have let them into my class.
And it’s not like I’m teaching all the same lessons again, either. As technology and my own skill sets evolve, so do the projects I assign. Granted, some lessons will be repeated – every class starts with students using PowerPoint to introduce themselves to the class – but others were already on the chopping block not because they were old news to the students (I didn’t know I’d have returning students yet), but because they were old news to me.
The media we use will still be the same. Students will still create animations, avatars, wallpapers, posters, and more. I don’t think I’m wrong for repeating those things so long as there’s something new about them. After all, I doubt the chorus majors will be saying “But we sang songs LAST year!”
I just have to keep things interesting, but you know what?
I think I just might be able to do that.
The photo above is the front wall of my school. On the day I stopped by to interview for my position (one of the best career choices I ever made, in my honest opinion), I saw this wall and thought “If I was a few decades younger, I’d try climbing that.”
Indeed, with all of those bricks pushed away from the flat surface, this wall was full of hand holds and toe holds. Perfect for climbing, except for the concrete and asphalt below you.
No, I never tried to climb that wall. After a childhood accident where I fell off a porch railing and broke a wrist I decided not to climb things where I could severely hurt myself. (I did later go cliff diving – repeatedly – but water landings aren’t so bad.)
Flash forward to our school’s end-of-the-year field day celebration. A couple enterprising students looked at that wall and had the same thoughts I had – without the “Oh, we could probably really hurt ourselves” thoughts to go with them.
Fortunately these students were far from unsupervised, and stern words and looks managed to stop them before they got more than a couple feet off the ground.
Everything.
My experience kept me from climbing that wall, and my experience kept those students from doing the same. They hadn’t yet learned that the benefit of climbing that wall (“Look how high I am!” “Look what I can do!”) was overshadowed by the drawback of a potential injury.
Switch gears to a Kindergarten classroom, where the teacher has decided not to let her kids use oil pastels because the benefits of learning a new media do not (in his or her mind) outweigh the drawbacks of potential hard to clean messes.
Switch again to a classroom where students are not allowed to create blogs because the perceived risks (Do I have to list them?) don’t outweigh the perceived benefits.
I’ve seen many teachers, administrators, and parents that thought of climbing a brick wall with no safety gear in the same light as student blogging, cell phones in schools, oil pastels in Kindergarten, or even letting special needs students use scissors.
The difference is that we as teachers would be fools to ignore taking proper precautions before a learning activity.
I’ve blogged about this before.
I argue that it’s not the same thing if we keep safety in mind. Let the Kindergarten students use oil pastels after setting out “placemats” (newspaper works fine) and reminding them that when a color is done it goes back in the box. Let students blog in a moderated setting, perhaps even in a “walled garden” environment where only the students, school employees, and parents can see what’s being said.
When a student wants to climb a wall, for goodness’ sake give them a helmet, safety line, and something soft to land on.
Then cheer with them when they see how high they can go.
Presented by Ryan Schaaf of Howard County.
The last time I attended a session on using games in education I was under whelmed, but I think that was more from the presenter than the subject. I am cautiously optimistic.
Presented by Roxanne Dean & Linda Jones, both from Baltimore County.
Presented by Diane Boarman, Howard County
This is possibly one of the smallest rooms I’ve ever been in, and there are few if any empty chairs. Meanwhile the walls are doing little to block out the noise of convention center staff moving things around. Nevertheless, the show must go on.
Today an email started floating around amongst various fellow employees of my school district. It contained a link to a particular YouTube video along with the caption “This video needs to be shown to teachers!”
I thought it was worth tweeting, and apparently I think it’s worth a blog post as well because here we are.
On the surface it’s a very upbeat video. “I can do this!” “You can do this!” The part that’s left out is the part that belongs to the viewer.
Each of us brings to every new experience all of our baggage. Our previous education, experiences, likes, dislikes, and so on all flavor how we react to something new. This can make us more or less inclined to enjoy the new things we encounter.
Having grown up with the idea of a particular type of vampire, for example, I am less inclined to enjoy the concept of vampires introduced in a certain popular series of books and movies. (I still maintain that Vampire + Sunlight = Charcoal. Glitter is not in the equation.)
A student introduced to a certain author or story genre in an academic setting may become soured towards those things if they dislike that classroom environment.
A teacher may avoid technology integration in their classroom if the examples they see implemented are too complex to understand, require too much additional work to pull off, or (in a worst case scenario) involve someone getting punished in some way for implementing the integration incorrectly.
And I begin to get to my point.
When I was a traveling visual arts teacher, I enjoyed the fact that I was not only demonstrating easy ways to integrate the arts but also easy ways to integrate technology. Slideshows, DE Streaming, audio, video, document cameras, and more were thrown in whenever I could do it quickly and easily. In some cases I – the itinerant – was using equipment that the teachers based in those buildings never touched, because they didn’t know it was there or didn’t think it would be better than the old way of doing things.
Now that I am in the same computer lab for the entire day I’m actually much more isolated than I was before, but I can still get a sense of what’s going on. Now, as before, I enter classrooms to see computers collecting dust or surrounded by enough books and boxes to make it obvious they haven’t been used in a while. I see SMART Boards and document cameras pushed aside in the corner of a room. I see LCD projectors that have been used more often to show movies during indoor recess than to actively engage students in learning activities.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of teachers in my building that enjoy using their SMART Boards on a daily basis and are having their students use them, too. There are teachers that encourage their students to use online resources both in and outside of the classroom. There are teachers that frantically contact me when their LCD projectors are not working properly, because their lessons depend on them. There are teachers coming to me and asking for advice on how to get their students blogging, how to create online quizzes, and how to have students submit assignments digitally. And the number of teachers who are like this is growing.
Why? Because the teachers in my building are sharing with each other. They attend their collaborative planning meetings every week and talk about how useful these tools are, and the other teachers decide to give it a try for themselves.
No one day professional development session that I’ve seen will make as much of a difference as one impassioned person who likes to show off what they can do with these awesome tools on a frequent basis. They are enough to get others to try it, and from there it spreads exponentially.
This is a far cry from a former principal of mine (whom I will not name) who attended a MICCA (now MSET) conference only to say “It’s a shame we can’t do any of that here.” (As someone who has presented at MICCA for years on what I’d been doing with my own classes I wondered what sessions she attended.)
So what are you doing? Are you trying new things? Bragging about what works? Trying to fix what doesn’t work? Showing others how the costs of integration are far outweighed by the benefits? If you’re not letting others know how technology works for you, you’re not doing enough to help the next generation.
We all bring our prior experiences with us. At your next collaborative planning, bring some good ones.
