The Joy of Teaching Art

During today's 1st grade class I had my students drawing pictures of their home and everyone that lives in it with them. They are doing this as preparation for their pop-up house, which they will begin on their next trip to the class.
This class has Jamari in it, which you may recall from a previous posting. When he finished drawing his home, a blue apartment building, I provided him with a new piece of paper to start the next step. Drawing people was frustrating him. He started over twice, and when I told him that what he was doing was great he accused me of "having to say that" because I am a teacher. This comment brought into perspective some of the wonders of being an art teacher. We do get to like everything that our students make because most of it is wonderful. Having so many students with such different styles is an amazing change of perspective. As a teacher of visual arts, I get to see the wide diversity of "right solutions" to so many different topics. For example, I had one student in my first grade class that drew his apartment with the ground level having a whole floor of doors, like the hallway of his apartment building. While visually his solution was not realistic, it should complex thought and perspective.

Emotional Face Collage, printing day 2

Today begins the second day of printing for the second graders. I began the lesson by showing examples for their last visit. I talked to them about their successful prints, and what had gone wrong with others. For example, if the paper ripped, why? If the colors look blurry, why? For today's class period the students were to make more prints. If they had time, they may clean their print and try a different color palette. These are two of my examples of the same print using different colors and already at the final stage (collaged). The cool colored face has the emotion of scared, while the warm colored face looks more embarrassed. Having students see these types of examples can show students that color can change the mood of an artwork. By making the same connection in their own examples can express to me (their teacher) that they understand that connection.

House Talk with 1st graders

Today I began my Pop-up House lesson with the first graders. I had started this project a couple days ago with the kindergarten class, and have been working hard to adjust the questions and style of the handout I created for this project. It is amazing the developmental difference between these two age groups, as they are only separated by a single year.
Today's lesson began with reading a digital version of "So Many Houses", then talking about different types of houses that the students may live in. They helped assemble different houses on the Smartboard, including: a 2-story house, a duplex, an apartment, and a trailer. The students then were provided with a worksheet that they were to complete on the rug, as I completed my version on the Smartboard. This was primarily done for the vocabulary, which I had them write in Spanish and English.
Only one student, Jamari, was causing me trouble during today's lesson. He was not doing the work that I was asking him and the rest of the class to do today. I told him that if he didn't complete the worksheet I would have him in here the following day during his lunchtime recess. By the end of the classtime he had not even started his worksheet. So I followed through, and at the end of the day I went to his class and talked to his classroom teacher. I believe that by having him come the next day to my classroom, it would show him that he cannot come to my classroom and not work because that is unacceptable behavior.

2nd graders begin making printing plate

I gave the printing demonstration to the 2nd graders today. This image shows one of my samples (I will be doing different ones for each of my three 2nd grade classes). While the students did not get as far as printing today, they were able to transfer their face design onto their printing plate (made from Styrofoam) and begin coloring the print with either warm or cool colors.

The steps I had them do include:

1. Outline their favorite face with black marker (some of the students I had marked a face with a star to encourage them to use that face. This was because they either used an example I gave for their face or if it was too complicated.).
2. Raise their hand when they finished, so that I could tape their printing plate on the back of their handout.
   
3. They were then to use a dull red pencil to go over the black marker lines. By doing this, they are pressing into the Styrofoam and leaving a faint image. The red pencil made it easy for them to see which lines they had drawn.
   
4. Remove the printing plate from the back of their handout. Then go over the impressions with the dull red pencil again.
5. Raise their hand and request either warm or cool colors.
6. Begin coloring the face, remembering to blend the colors and emphasize the emotion with lines and design.

Most students at least began to color their plates. Any students that finished were given a book to read on emotions.

Groundhog Day - 6 more weeks of winter

So it's Groundhog Day. Again. At B.T. Washington art classes are labeled as Specials in each grades' school schedule. Students are rotated between art, music and P.E. One third of each of the grades go to each of these three areas. Because B.T.Washington has a self-contained specials department and is a 2-strand school (general and bilingual classrooms), the Specials are the only time during the school day that students in the bilingual program, gifted program, and general classroom are integrated within the same classroom. I have mentioned in my 1st day of student teaching that the schedule is set up so that we see a third of each grade level each day, which means that when I plan a lesson I will teach it three times. This is why Mrs. Carey refers to the repeated days as Groundhog Day's, a direct reference to the 1993 film starring Bill Murray where he plays a weatherman living the same day over and over. So if I mention that it is groundhog day when its any day not February 2, this is what I am referring to.

On the topic of Groundhog Day, see the official site for Phil. He says we will have 6 more weeks of winter. Boo!

Rainbow Fish Pop-up

The Rainbow Fish Pop-up is the first project I completed with the kindergarten class. I did not get any pictures of their book, but I have my teacher sample here so you may see the final results.
Students completed this project over the course of 4 days. During the first day they were introduced to color mixing. They used primary and secondary colors to paint 1/4" stripes in a rainbow pattern (R.O.Y.G.B.P.). For this age group it is important to emphasize proper material treatment, particularly keeping the brush clean between color changes and handling the brush. Also, when you demo tell the students that they want to leave no white spots between the paper.
During the second day, the students made the water paper that the pop-up would be assembled on. Blue paper with blue paints, students were encouraged to use at least 3 different brush strokes, lines and colors.
On the third day the students were read Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. This is a book about sharing, and the students made their pop-up based on this book. They learned about making a pop-up. Then they cut out their rainbow fish from their rainbow paper and begin collaging other elements like seaweed, a starfish, an octopus, and other fish into their background. They will complete this on day 4. They will get a shiny gill and googly eyes too. :)

January Gotcha Celebration

Schools are a community, and teachers must work together to offer constancy to all students within the school environment. Students must be held accountable for their behavior anywhere on the school's property; not just their homeroom. At B.T.Washington, students only come to the art room 1-2 times per week. It is vital that students have the same expectations in the art room as they would have in any other place within the school. B.T.Washington has a system in place that they call the High Fives. Students are to "be respectful", "be responsible", "be there and be ready", "be safe", and "follow directions" in all locations of the school. There are rewards to following these five simple rules, and today marks one such occasion. At the end of each month, students that have earned themselves a set number of Gotchas get to attend a 45-minute trip to the Gotcha Celebration. Gotchas are paper tokens that student can earn daily be being recognized for their High Five behavior. This is part of B.T.Washington's positive reinforcement strategy.
I got to help set up the gym for the Gotcha Celebration. They were assembling new activities, and one of these was a Fishing for Prizes activity that needed a banner made of blue paper to represent water. The activity would consist of students using "fishing poles" to hang over the blue banner. Behind this banner would be a teacher and some prizes. When the fishing pole is hung over the banner, the teacher would put a prize on the end of the pool. I had about 10 minutes to put this together.
While the event was going on, I was in the art room. The students that had not collected enough Gotchas to be able to attend the event got to be in the art room watching different educational videos. While the videos proved to be entertaining, these students were not happy to be in here. Thankfully, Mrs. Smith was there monitoring the more naughty groups.
One thing that surprised me was that some of the students that had caused a lot of trouble over the last couple weeks were able to attend the Gotcha Celebration. Mrs. Carey and I discussed this can came to the conclusion that students that are sent out of the classroom to talk to Mrs. Smith, the school's discipline manager, should have the additional consequence of having to collect at least 5 more Gotchas than the medium the rest of the students have to achieve. For example, if the medium is 80 for the month of January and you were sent to Mrs. Smith twice, you would need to collect 90.

2nd graders recognizing emotions with warm & cool colors

Prior to today I had been team teaching, but today is different. Today I led my first lesson with the 2nd graders. I started by reading the book "The Way I Feel" by Janan Cain. I had the students look at the facial expressions and the use of color as I read, then talked with the students about some of the more expressive pages. I had them look at the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth on these faces. I didn't talk about the hair, though it is very expressive in this book. The most important thing from them to recognize is the faces, as they will be drawing faces today that have different emotions. The color is important too. Warm colors with an angry face emphasizes the emotion, as blood goes to your face if you get very mad. While cool colors with scares shows you are trying to stay under the radar... or that "you were so scared the color drained from your face" can be expressed with toning down colors with white. Before having the students go to their seats, I went over illustrating these emotions on the Smartboard. I had students put "angry eyebrows" on a face and so on. Once every student had a turn, I showed them their handout. I told them that I expected them to draw two different faces with two different emotions. They needed to write the emotion on the provided space, select if they thought warm or cool colors described the emotion best, and describe a time when they felt that emotion. While the last wasn't always successfully answered, the faces were very fun to see.

Reading Recovery Banner

The other day I completed the reading recover banner, and I emailed the file to the teacher. This morning she brought it in to show to me and Mrs. Carey. She also invited me to attend the event.

Still Life resource

National Gallery of Art has an amazing Still Life Composer resource that may be integrated into the classroom. I found it particularly useful with a Smartboard, as each student may add an item to a composition. The lesson I used this with was a starting point for the 3rd grade's still life project. The skills that they needed to recognize for the project was overlapping objects, foreground/middle ground/background, and that items in the background are usually going to be smaller. Below is an example of a composition made at the National Gallery of Art.

2nd graders recognizing warm and cool colors

Today the second graders were shown warm and cool color palettes. One of the classes had begun the last lesson looking at facial expressions, and we were attempting to get across an understanding that colors can express emotion too. While most of the faces were not as successful as we had hoped, it motivated a change in approach. So today's 2nd grade class were shown the color palettes and asked to paint a 12" x 18" sheet of paper using only cool colors. When they completed that, they were to paint one using only warm colors. They were to practice blending and making brush strokes, while also keeping the paint on the palette clean. I used these sheets for the display outside of the art room, with the anticipation of removing them once the project hey are intended for – the Emotional Face Collage – progresses into its later stage. The point being made with the display is that artists use colors to express emotion.

The 1st Conflict

So today the art room functioned as a detention center during the lunch hour. Apparently because the disciplinary office is attached to the cafeteria and Mrs. Smith (who is the person the kids go to when they get kicked out of their classroom) is busy monitoring the lunchroom, some of the surplus students are dispersed among classrooms like the art room. Today we had a student named Vanessa brought to the art room after she ate (her recess time) doe 3o minutes. As soon as Mrs. Carey left the room, Vanessa started pulling things from her pocket like lip gloss and a bouncy ball. Obviously, she wasn't suppose to be having any sort of fun and not playing with anything. I told her she needed to put that stuff back in her pocket. I had used her name too, which is kind of easy to remember when you are told you are having a specific student brought to the room to be punished. Teachers do this thing called talking to one another and student names are shared. I'm saying all this because Vanessa right away began saying that that wasn't her name. Whatever.

At 12:30, the next class came in and at 12:40 she was to go back to her classroom. I was asked to escort her. Right away this was showing complications as she was wanting to walk the speed of a turtle. When we finally passed the music room (one two doors down) one of the other girls that had gotten in trouble with Vanessa (it was a total of three girls that were bullying other kids on the playground) came out and thought she should go back with us too. This caused additional complications, as Vanessa attempted to follow this second girl into the music room to collect her things. But she was cutting off an oncoming group of 1st graders, so I reached out an tugged on her hoodie, causing her to freak out on me. I was not going to deal with this attitude to the opposite side of the school building, and the office was oh so close. So I instead said we were going to the office. This worked. I ran right away into Mrs. Smith, who said Vanessa needed to just return to the art room until she learned how to walk down the hall. She also earned herself 5 more lunch detentions in the art room and that she needed to see me (if only a little) as a figure of authority.

Not exactly the best moment in my teaching, but it is far better to learn it student teaching than afterwards.

Reading Recovery Banner

I had one of the teachers come to me asking me to make a banner for the new reading recovery program. She said she had something started in Word and that I am welcomed to sit down with her and help her fix it there. I opted to just spend a little time at home doing this. The dimensions will be 5' long by 18" tall. She wants the words "Read it up" and some balloons.

Building relationships

One of the ongoing themes I see emerging from the student teacher experience is the requirement of building relationships with students. The "problem children" require a lot of attention and normally will not recognize authoritative rolls if they do not know who you are. These children depend on consistency and do not react well to change. As a student teacher, my roll is temporary within the school but it is very important to develop bonds with the students within the school - most especially the students that then to cause problems within the class. As part of my first several weeks I will be learning my students' names (~280 total).

One such case includes a student named Vanessa. During the first several days of class Mrs. Carey and I would sit in the front of the class. I would introduce myself to the class, take attendance, and then Mrs. Carey would go on with her lesson. During the first lesson that Vanessa had been in class with me, she began asking me (during Mrs. Carey's presentation mind you) if I wanted to buy girl scout cookies. I'm all for entrepreneurship, but there is a right time and place for everything - during class time is definitely not the right time nor the right place.

My 1st day of Student Teaching

I began my first day of student teaching at B.T.Washington Elementary with the students returning from a 5 day weekend, which meant that the students would be additionally rambunctious. I had been nervous because I didn't know what to expect, but excited because it would be a "real" teaching experience with all sorts of real problems known of a public school. All I have experienced prior to this new experience has been idealized experiences under the control of the University, teaching at day camps to students interested in art, and Art a la Cart to classrooms with the primary teacher still in it. B.T.Washington Elementary is a bilingual Spanish school with a high percentage of free/reduced meal plans (~85%), meaning there are a lot of students from poor families. I had selected this school primarily because of the teacher. Mrs. Carey had received national recognition for her services within the school; plus, I had had a course with her when I first began graduate school. I respected how she thought about her students, and believe that working under her guidance would be a benefit to my future as an art teacher.
Through the course of this first day I learned of the routine we would be having. We get 1/3 of each grade level each day, so once you've taught one lesson the next two day's is Groundhog Day. This week will primarily be observation, plus some team teaching.

Blue Bunny Ornaments

This Christmas I'm making a collection of ornaments to give to friends and family. They are based on my blue bunny video and I am obsessed with making them. So cute!

I used Crayola Model Magic to make these. I dyed them with Crayola markers before modeling it into the bunnies. The ears are a little on the fragile end. I would not recommend making these for gifts for friends with little kids, as they want to play with the bunny. Instead, I would recommend making trees or snowmen.

Lab 11 /

Which chatbots were the most convincing? What was done well? What done poorly? Within 10 years, will there be a program that can pass a five-minute Turing test? Is the Turing test a reasonable measure of whether a machine can think? More generally, if a program can behave in a way that is indistinguishable from human behavior, can it be said to think, and, if not, then what is thought?

As part of the requirements for Lab 11 of Informatics 102 students enrolled were to have a 5-minute chat with 3 chatbots and take a Turing test to decide it the 'bot' on the other end was a human or a machine. The three cyberbots were Eliza, Alice, and Jabberwacky. Eliza was programmed to model the speech patterns of a Rogerian psychologist. When talking with Eliza, circular logic becomes a pattern. It does not understand meaning of many words, which ends up creating sentences that make little sense. For example, because it is programmed to respond to the short response of "Yes/No" with "You are being positive/negative", when the user (in this example, me) replies with "I am not" (as a method of disagreeing) Eliza assumes "not" to be a state of mind (not as a method of disagreeing). I found Alice to be on the annoying end. Jabberwacky proved to be the most interesting of the three. The statements made were quirky, and a little more "human-like". For the most part, though, the statements seemed really confusing and not really fitting with the conversation.

The Turing test was most obviously a computer. I attempted speaking with the bot several times, and my internal compass never grasped a feeling of a human being on the other end. As stated in Shieber's article The Turing Test and the Loebner Prize, it was "realized early on that given the current state of the art, there was no chance that Turing's test, as originally defined, had the slightest chance of being passed by a computer program." So in order to give the computer a fighting chance at fooling any human performing a Turing Test, restrictions on the conversation were put into place. These limitations included two things: topic of the conversation and tenor (i.e. emotion).

I believe that if a cyberbot can achieve the intellectual conversation level of a human, it is the achievement of mankind that took it to that place. It is not 'thinking' until responses no longer need to be programmed and abstract connects can be made as swiftly as the human brain. I also believe that cyberbots have a place in our civilization. For example, as a method to supervise the Internet. I believe making the Internet safer for children and absent of visual stimuli that could be considered abusive (i.e. child porn) would be a valuable application of A.I. On this platform, the cyberbot could monitor chatrooms or help in catching online preditors.

Should these Judicial Candidates retain their office?

Sue E. Myerscough
Bio

Thomas Difanis (R), 1995, 2008
Put a stop Urbana City Council from meeting in private.

Harry E. Clem (R), 1979, 2008
Nothing really solid can be found beyond individual cases.

Arnold F. Blockman (D), 1996, 2008
Primarily tries family custody cases and states that with the current laws, custody is primary given to one parent. He's gotten a lot of static from fathers, where groups have even posted billboards against him. The following links will provide more insight into this matter.
Fatherless in America
Divorce and Custody excerpts:
"For those unhappy about his custody rulings, Blockman said the appellate court is probably the best indicator of if his actions are appropriate. Since taking the bench, Blockman said, 105 of his rulings have been appealed; 91 were affirmed outright; seven were partially affirmed. That means seven cases, or less than 7 percent, were overturned. Those numbers involve all kinds of cases, but for the last five years, he's done essentially nothing but family cases... Blockman said it's true he doesn't grant joint custody when only one parent wants it. But it's because the law precludes him, not because he has a prejudice against a particular parent."
News-Gazette: Judge receives criticism

Katherine McCarthy
Commenter on blog calls her "nice" and "reasonable"

A. G. Webber
Judging the Judges
More on the above

Blue Rabbit

Today the Girl that Got her Hair Cut Off morphed into a Blue Rabbit. This is practice video focusing on movement and color consistency.

With cheap cameras you will have really slow reaction to the color balance. I'm working with a XBox360Live. You really need to wait about 3-5 seconds once your hands have left the 'stage' for the camera to have enough time to adjust the coloring. This was an unpredicted piece of knowledge I get to share today. Can't wait to write it into a lesson plan!

First attempt at Claymation:

Girl Realizing her Hair got Cut Off
This is my first attempt at making a Claymation video with iStopMotion. Its a little out of focused and the environment isn't so well planned, but the short is fun.