| | 4 months since my last post......oops. It's been a crazy semester. I'll give a short academic recap before getting to what this post is really about.
I have been doing my teaching practicum this semester. This isn't student teaching, but rather the step that comes before it. The semester is split in half, the first part for middle school, and the second for high school. For each one, we go into the school for either one or two periods and observe the teaching, help out with the students and the lesson, and then teach 1-3 days...normally. In my case, it didn't turn out quite how it should have.
In the middle school, I was fortunate enough to be in the classroom of a teacher that is said by multiple people to be the best art teacher in Eastern Indiana. So great yeah? Well she also happened to have a student teacher this semester. So I didn't get to see much teaching from her. I ended up teaching about 5-6 days worth of lessons because of weather messing up our schedule. My students created large outdoor madonnari (Italian chalk drawings) of people in Venetian festival masks (They had just finished making masks of their own). It rained 2 times in the week we did this, so everything got changed and retimed etc. But they looked great and we celebrated with an Italian festival of our own
For the high school, our class got told we couldn't go to the school that had already made plans for us to come. So the professor scrambled to find a replacement SCHOOL and we ended up at Burris, Ball State's Laboratory School. At this, all 5 art ed majors did a collective groan. There are 5 of us in the class and 1 art teacher at Burris. Not only that, but while my middle school teacher was one of the best, this one is one of the worst. Laziness does not make for good teaching. So I've been team teaching with my friend Nathan Fry for the last 4 weeks. The first week, we observed and helped out (pretty much did the teaching) and then for the past 3 weeks we've done all the teaching. We're supposed to be done there as we only have one more week of classes in the semester, but nope, we'll be back for perhaps the entire week. But why you ask? Because I'm the insane person that came up with our mega lesson: stop-motion silhouette animation.
Another art ed friend of mine, Leslie, did this project for her senior Honors thesis and it turned out really cool. I watched her do a lot and have done SOME stop motion of my own, so I thought I'd try it out on high schoolers. Too bad I didn't take into account that this class had become lazy thanks to a teacher that didn't teach any content and told everyone she didn't believe in deadlines. So getting a good portion of the class to work has been a challenge, but the past few days have been great. All but one group is already to the computers to actually animate, using hundreds of photos they took, manipulating hinged characters they drew and cut out. The last group should finish up on Monday and join them on the computers. Once they're done and I've figured out how to compress them all into one file, I'll post it on youtube and link it here. They're animating Little Red Cap (Little Red Riding Hood).
But now for what this post is really about. As of about 2-2:30 this morning, I am dating the girl of my dreams. Her name is Megan, she is 23, an art ed major in my class, though finishing a year behind me, slightly shorter than me, with long curly brown hair. I've personally liked her pretty much since I first saw her in an educational psychology class last Spring and instantly became great friends with her from April on. Some of you may recall, but she's also the same girl I asked out, yet crashed and burned with at the beginning of the summer. Who knows, maybe there's even a post here about that. It's been that long. It's just starting out, so no labels or anything like that. But I'm happy. Happier than I've been in a long time.
Now I'm going back to bed since I've only gotten 4 hours of sleep or so. More news when news arrives.
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| | Posted 12/1/2007 8:47 AM - 25 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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