23.10.09
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.
15.10.09
3.10.09
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!
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!
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