Day 9: Majoring in Arts and Crafts

Fair warning: because these next three days are the last part of orientation, I am drowning in work. Thus, my posts will be shorter than I would like, but I will do my best to keep this up to speed.

The Golden State Warriors won the NBA finals tonight, so one of the other teachers baked us cakes to celebrate!

At Penn, we joke sometimes that the College of Arts and Sciences is more like the College of Arts and Crafts. The thing about people going into teaching though is that a lot of the job IS arts and crafts. I have made something artistic virtually every day since I have been here. In our training, we talk a lot about Bloom's Taxonomy, a system through which mental tasks are ranked in order of the complexity of thinking they require. In that system, "creativity" is the highest order on the pyramid, and yet I have been led to wonder why, if this is the case, creative careers are some of the least well-paid, least common and in general least-respected professions in the work force. Why are they so stigmatized, and why is our society rewarding mediocrity and excessive degrees over mental flexibility and innovation? (My thoughts on this have also been influenced by a DP op-ed one of my friends wrote recently. Read it here if you are interested.)

Anyways, this morning was mainly about continuing to develop lesson plans, and it went decidedly better than yesterday. Matt and I are starting to fall into a groove as a partnership, which is helpful, particularly since we have three new lesson plans to write and prepare all materials (slideshows, worksheets, etc.) for between the end of work and midnight tomorrow afternoon. Yes, you are allowed to gasp on my behalf.

This evening, however, I did a lot of crafting. For two hours after orientation was finished, the teachers stayed to help the high school interns decorate the whole school in line with our theme of "Superheroes". I worked with one in particular to assign superheroes to each teacher based on their personalities. We will be pasting their faces on top of the chosen characters on a billboard right near my classroom later this week. As I left the school, I got to look around and see all the different decorations people had made. I was, and am, in awe of the artistic talent of my coworkers and particularly these high school students. Some of these billboards are, in my humble opinion, museum quality. I hope the kids appreciate them. (Additionally, this was a much nicer process than how we did it in Philly last year as we did not have a full high school intern staff, so the teachers had to stay until 11 PM one night to finish all of the decorations ourselves and it was MISERABLE.)

Front entryway sign... one of many, many, MANY beautiful billboards in the school.

When I got home, I spent a few hours working on the picture frames for my advisees. (Backtracking, every teacher is assigned 4-5 students in the grade they teach to mentor and coach throughout the summer. This was my favorite part of last summer and I cannot wait to do it again with a new group of kids with an entirely different set of struggles. Each advisor, in preparation for their kids, reads through the entirety of their academic file including school-year report cards and standardized test scores since 4th grade, annual surveys, parent notes, reports from past teaching fellows on the students' performance and more. We then prepare their lockers and organizers and create little picture frames based on one or more of their interests to hang by the main staircase for people to look at as they walk in.) The product of tonight's work is below. I got two done and one halfway completed, so I have one and a half to go before Saturday. For the sake of privacy, I blurred my students' faces.

They're pop-up style! I attached the little paper people to pipe cleaners so they'd stand out, literally and figuratively!

Easier to see from the side.

Gotta catch 'em all! Advisees!

Lastly for today, I want to backtrack and upload the snapshots from my Life Map from last week. As a refresher, our assignment was to create a map of the important experiences that have influenced our passion for education. Of course, there are many things which have pushed me toward the field that I did not include (my mom going back for her degree, my teachers in high school, etc.) but I think I nailed a lot of the major plot points. I hope you like it.

Because I live on Oreos.

Grandma, sorry for making you look like the Joker.

Nailed Wesley's spiky hair. Just saying.

It's a Baobab Blast! TELL EVERYBODY.

Still completely unfathomable to me.

Irony: Education saved my education!

*best summer of my life... until now.

I hope putting this online is ethical... ;-)

In case you were wondering, yes, that is a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When all is said and done, I don't know what I would do without a creative outlet. I'm kind of concerned where I will find that once I graduate college, but since I know it is a literal physical need, I will definitely prioritize it. I guess in some ways, this blog is a creative outlet in and of itself. Maybe I'll keep going when the 58 days are up. Only time will tell.

Until next time.
Nate