Optimisim or pessimism

When you teach, you look forward to the good days with a class. Those days where everyone stays on task, where the collective accepts your guidance and behaves as if they believe that you know what you're talking about. My art class has perhaps turned a corner. This past Friday was much less of a struggle as a leader for these young people. It seemed finally that I've hit upon a way to interact with them that lets them look toward working together and toward creating art, rather than simply trying to keep me from giving them any kind of instruction at all.

The project at hand is creating a panel of rock art in the style of an ancient "cave" culture: Native American, Australian Aboriginal or Proto-European. All four groups chose Native American for their theme, and then they were quite surprised that there would be research and cultural considerations to include in their art and storytelling.

What bothered me personally was that it seemed to me that the class itself behaved only because one student, the "why do we have to learn this, and how can you make us read and write and think about math for art?" student was absent.

Nevertheless, I do believe that the end product for this project will be good, and it will be worthy of display for the school at large. I hope I can find a nice place to put it up, and that students will appreciate having their work visible to the whole student body.