Residency- Field Community School- 3 Hours
The students are finishing their clay projects they've been working on for awhile. I enjoy seeing them finally completed, especially side-by-side with their partners (if they're working with a partner). When the students were done, they had the chance to make another clay project. It was a bowl, and there were handouts on how to do it. It's good that the teacher left a "Plan B" project for the students who were done with their main project so they wouldn't have to sit around and waste time.
After class I met with the teacher and we discussed the timeline for our upcoming lesson. She is going to give the students a little bit of information about comics and do small activities with them to help prepare my bigger lesson.
(Thursday) Residency- Barton Open School- 3 Hours
Today I taught my lesson for the three Language Arts class periods. It went better as the day progressed, partly because the students needed time to warm up to me, but also because after time went on I gained a sense of what worked and what didn't work and could improve it from there. My lesson centered on creating comics through studying panel transitions as explained in Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics. I taught the students about the panel transitions, and then had them apply it to an example comic that I drew.
When my lecture was over I set them free to draw their own comics based on The Pearl. I went around the room and checked in with them and answered any questions that they had. It was flattering to have them ask me questions because that shows that they trust that I know what I'm talking about. I also enjoyed answering their questions and having these conversations with them because I always enjoy talking about comics. Some of my favorite questions to answer were ones that I did not expect, but was able to find an answer to anyways. Occasionally I would reference another comic artist they reminded me of and showed them examples using the Internet.
(Friday) Residency- Barton Open School- 5 Hours
After the word of the day and a vocabulary quiz, the students spent most of the day continuing the comics from yesterday. So it was nice that I was there to continue helping. Some students were further along than others, but nearly everyone had started their final draft. Unlike yesterday, where the questions the students had for me were primarily about how they can best communicate their ideas, today a lot of the questions were "How do you draw a _______?" This was a difficult question, of course, because I can't draw anything for them, but I helped them the best I could by explaining concepts such as that forms can be broken down into shapes, and that it helps a lot to be able to observe a subject if you can.
I stayed for the rest of the day, which is when Film Studies is taught. Today was especially cool as there was a guest speaker talking about Alfred Hitchcock and the suspense genre. He was clever in how he explained "suspense." He turned off the lights and shushed everybody and peered out the window like something was out there, but didn't tell us what he was doing. This made everybody go quiet, and he used that gimmick to explain that suspense means anticipation. He then showed us scenes from a few different Hitchcock movies, including the shower scene from Psycho. After each scene he asked the students if they noticed anything relevant to it. He seemed well-versed in his knowledge of these films because he seemed to have an interesting response to everything the students said, and had a way of tying it all together in the end.