Holocaust Remembrance

Tonight I attended the Holocaust Remembrance Program of the Greater Syracuse Community themed Never Again: What you do matters. At the Remembrance they had a hallway dedicated to the winners of the art competition held throughout Syracuse middle and high schools.

For the competition students were encouraged to create what "Never Again: What you do matters" means to you. It was great to see the different ways students represented the Holocaust and what the event meant to them. There was one picture where the page was filled with random words all over describing the word remember. There was one where a student had sculpted a picture of women looking out of window through clay. There was a few pictures where students had drawn using crayons or colored pencils different representations of concentration camps. There was an excellent sketch by a high school girl that was a large portrait of a concentration camp where she used simple shading with black and white to create an image of pain and sadness.

Seeing how students used different forms of art to make sense of such a terrible part of our history really hit home to me as to how important art can be for students. Using it as a form of expression in this case allowed the students to get their feelings of pain, sadness, and helplessness that was captured inside of them from learning about the Holocaust.

Rubrics

I think rubrics are a great way for assessing student work. First, rubrics provide students with a direction as to what the teacher is looking for in the final product. There are no surprises, no hidden agendas, students know exactly what is expected of them. Second, I think rubrics provide the teacher with reasons for grades. When parents call in and ask why their son or daughter received a failing grade on the project, myself as the teacher can say well according to their grading sheet, they were missing this, this, and this and didn't complete this, this, and this and so on.

I had an interesting experience with using a rubric during my student teaching. There was a rubric created for students book report projects. The projects were quite extensive as was the rubric. Many times, I found myself looking over projects thinking they were done very nicely but when graded against the rubric for the content I was really looking for, many of them did match up to the grades I would have given them if I was just going off my first assumption. I think that is a great example of how important rubrics can be so teacher's aren't being bias in their grading and also so that teachers can really assess the content they are looking for.

It Was Always the Pictures

I really enjoyed reading this article because it contained many good ideas for me in my future classroom. I think having many different ways to create visual aids could benefit many students in a classroom, despite their classification in a school setting.

I particularly liked the section on using graphic organizers. When I was student teaching at Pine Grove Middle School, my sixth graders were taught about different forms of graphics organizers. It was established by the grade level that graphic organizers was something teachers really wanted students to learn and utilize. In every sixth grade classroom there were about 10 posters hanging on the walls with each one showing a different layout for a graphic organizer. Students were encouraged to use whatever style worked best for them whenever they felt it might help them.

As a teacher in this setting, I felt it was my job to structure lessons and activities around the possibility of using a graphic organizer. I wanted my students to have the chance, if they choose to use it, to use the graphic organizer and receive as much practice as possible while I could be there to guide them through it. I thought it was great that all the teachers were working with the graphic organizers and that there were so many different choices for students to choose that hopefully everyone was able to find a style that would work for him/her.

Romare Bearden

I really enjoyed my time on Bearden's web site. I was fascinated that his creation is as big as a school bus in reality! It is always interested to me to hear about, and in this case visualize, the life of another person. The best part of the design for me was that the windows were open to see what the people were doing inside. With the creation of the web site I was able to zoom in and really get a sense of Bearden's world.

Another part of the web site I really enjoyed was the "things to do" category. It had great games for younger kids familiarizing them with the picture and what is taking place. It also had great ideas for adults and extension activities for using this in the classroom. I could design a whole lesson around the "Imaginative Words" section where students listen to the passage first.
The site gave me some great ideas and opened my mind to how important it is to allow students to express their personal lives in ways that are meaningful to them.

Graphic Novels

I really liked the idea of bringing graphic novels into the classroom and I understand the benefits they can have in the classroom. One idea I never thought of is that it allows the students to view and understand the material at their own pace. As Yang said it doesn't matter how fast I can talk because students can read it at any speed they want. When you are considering the wide range of student ability levels and learning styles in one classroom, the graphic novel would be a great differentiation tool to use.

Personally, I would find using the graphic novel hard. First off, I am a perfectionists and do not consider myself a good drawer. Therefore, to complete one lecture with a graphic novel would take me forever. Unfortunately, I do not like to draw, I only find it challenging and frustrating because my pictures never come out to look how I planned. Also, I am not a big reader of comics. I think, as unfortunate as it is, teachers often teach to the learning styles that work best for them while only incorporating the others every once in a while when they happen to think about it. Creating graphic novels would be something I would really have to think about and challenge myself to use in the classroom a lot of the time.

Further down in the article they show examples of already created graphic novels. That is something I would be much more likely to use in my classroom and I think would be much easier for the students to understand than my own personal drawings.

Islamic Art

In the article Islamic Art and Geometric design I really liked their ideas on how you can teach geometric shapes across content by bringing in science and social studies to what seems like a simple math concept. One thing I was concerned about after reading the article was the practice of separating of church and state. I had a parent teacher conference experience during our student teaching simulation where a parent was angry about a passage in a book that he felt went against his religion. I can only imagine where parents might go when I explain to students about Islam when they ask me where these shapes and ideas on drawing came from.

With the second article, Islamic Art as an Educational Tool, I again was flooded with ideas on how the many ideas of how one could tie art into a social studies lesson. Also after reading the second article I am re-thinking my previous notion about teaching about Islam. I am realizing my own naive thinking and seeing there are many more aspects that go into teaching about Islamic art than the religion. I think it would take a lot of thinking and planning but I am feeling more comfortable after reading more about Islamic Art that I could use it in my classroom as a tool for the future.

How Art is Made

While I was reading through this article about how children learn art I could not help but relate things that I have learned about being in the classroom to things I am now learning about art. Through methods courses we are always talking about ways students learn aside from the typical instructional strategies. Little things that teachers do, maybe not even intentionally that students pick up on. One thing that came to my mind while reading this article was that most teachers preface any drawing they do in front of the classroom with "I'm a terrible drawer but..." and then everyone laughs after the drawing is complete no matter what it looks like.

Teachers need to be modeling for students the idea that drawing is a part of a person, you do not need have amazing skills and create a Mona Lisa to be respected as an artists. Some how the idea of every student needing to color in the lines, every student needing to make grass green and apples red has created a sigma that makes someone either good or bad at art. Teachers feed off that sigma when they stand at the board in front of the entire class and allow everyone to make fun of their drawings because they do not look exactly like the trees that grow outside or the car that drives down the street.