Style in which I teach: direct instruction, so there’s a knowledge base from the teacher, and then small groups where kids talk informally so they’re comfortable about what they learn. Then I go up to them one by one and elicit their conversations in their genre.
A lot of our students have not been heard. Neighbor kids still come by after they graduate — they just want to be heard. They want someone to listen to them. I really think our generation right now is missing that, our students have something to say. And that intimacy of sitting there with students —and to let them know that what they’re saying and thinking is okay. If they get a little off topic — if they go outside to the coding of swearing, the teacher can stop it right away, before it becomes explosive: “I’m old enough to be your grandmother,” or “I’m the adult in the room, and I find that offensive.”
Once students like you, learning is so much easier. So if they build up a whole wall for a semester because they don’t like you — that’s a wasted semester! You have to break that wall down somewhere. Listening seems like a good beginning.
My classroom is huge; it’s the size of three typical classrooms, so there’s a lot of space and a lot of walking.
This year the kids seemed more pensive. However, kids are amazingly resilience — there were a lot of gang deaths this year and the school had to contend with that. That’s another reason to have a resident arts teacher. If it were simply a guest artist- they would not understand the climate of the school. Those students had to walk through the door again and you had to greet them and give them their space, and maybe an academic classroom teacher had to work them just as hard as usual (for the tests), but sometimes in art they could take some down time and just draw quietly, and make up their other work at home. I can add that flexibility to my program and still meet the standards and criteria because some of that stuff can be taken home. Sometimes they just need to sit with their peers and express their grief.
Half of our population is Latino — so we do the Day of the Dead, which is also a celebration of the living of their lives. This year we did a celebration of their lives — which satisfied all our cultures. We did an outdoor planting that integrated many arts, which was the idea of the principal and an outside consultant. It was a school-wide, thematic approach to the Day of the Dead that included everyone: The dancers did a small production; the art students had a wall of artwork (large boards, murals). It was very successful, and we should do more of this sort of thing to bring teens together.
