Things have been crazy busy!

I haven’t blogged in a couple of days because I have been so busy. I am going to catch up on some of the highlights.

Thursday I had a hard lockdown drill with one my classes that consists of mostly sixth graders and they have been challenging as it is. Half of the class had to go with me into one of the back rooms. Students are supposed to sit quietly in the back room with the lights off. An extra table went with my side of the room because they wanted to be with their friends. Once we were in the room they were unruly and would not stop screwing around. I would turn the lights on and they would pause, but as soon as the lights were off again they were misbehaving again. Once they were back in their seats again, my cooperating teacher had me lead a conversation about he importance of drills. I asked the class why we would go into a lockdown. And what might happen if you were talking during a real incident. It felt weird to be leading that kind of discussion but they needed to hear it.

All last week my cooperating teacher, the MYP coordinator, and I have been working on our data team for this one point perspective unit. It has been a lot of work and quite intimidating. My cooperating teacher and the MYP coordinator were on two different pages so hashing that out was interesting. The part that we kept getting stuck on was how to differentiate the lesson for the students. The MYP coordinator was stating that we should try something new so that the data team process would be more informative. The suggestions that she gave would have been difficult to implement in the art room especially with the class sizes that we have. I decided to group the students based on their ability to use the perspective concepts that we have been working on and placed helpful handouts and different how-to handouts on their tables. So far it has been working out well and I am finding that many of the students that have not been doing well simply needed to focus more. Quite a few have been moved to a different/higher group. I will be doing a mid-unit assessment next week to see how the students have changed since their pre-assessment at the beginning of the unit.

One of my classes has been harder to manage than the others. They are overall, highly disrespectful to me, themselves, and the other adults in the room. The only time they aren’t is when my cooperating teacher is in the room. I talked to them about their ideal art room today and what my expectations are. It seemed to work for most of the students, but there are two that feed off of each other and are extremely disrespectful. One of them kept scraping the finish off of the table today so I sent her to the buddy room with a fix it plan but she refused to do it so I sent her to ISS. Of course the first time I send someone to ISS it happens to be closed! There was only ten minutes left of class so she had to sit in the office for ten minutes. Either way the behavior was documented and she knows that I am not giving empty threats. This class is a challenge so hopefully today helps for the rest of the year.

I asked one of my Art 2 students to bring in some of the drawings that he has been working on at home for his personal project. Last Thursday he came into class and told me that he wasn’t able to bring it in because he was having a rough week and art wasn’t the first thing on his mind. I told him that was fine and asked if he wanted to talk at all, but he did not. I told my cooperating teacher about it so that she would know that he might be a little off that day. She told me his parents are going through a divorce. That is the kind of thing that i have trouble leaving at school, but I am trying to be better about it. My cooperating teacher was impressed that he told me that he was having a rough week because she said it was a testament to the relationships that I have been building with the students. That felt good! Today, he showed me some photos on his phone of the drawings because he has been drawing video game concept art on photoshop for his project. They looked really good!

Overall there is a lot going on at school between data team, the personal projets, and behavior, but I am still truckin!