We spent all of this week working on creative projects! At the end of last week, we had a teacher planning day, which I used to make an example body biography. I didn't realize how much I'd missed drawing all the time until I'd started working on it. Whatever creative projects I assign in my future classes, I'm absolutely going to take the time to do it myself beforehand. And if I'm not having fun playing with art on my own, then that should be a sign that I need to change my project.
The body bios were the first multi-day project in groups that we had done, and that turned out to be a huge sticking point. Absences are already a major problem at Cedar, and my mentor warned me to have a plan in place to sort that out if I really wanted to do group work. I thought that it would be easy enough to just have kids join groups late, but even still it got difficult. For example, there was one group of two boys on the first day. On the second day, I had an absent girl join their group and try to catch up. On the third day, both boys were absent but the girl was present. So how can I grade this project fairly?? I ended up letting the girl just work on her own to complete the planning organizer, and credited the boys on their seperate organizer and unfinished poster, but that still felt kind of unfair. Shouldn't everyone have had the option to work on their own like that if they wanted to? They just hadn't happened to end up with an absent group.
One way I tried to make it more fair was by having everyone fill out a peer evaluation form, basically just explaining what they thought each group member did best, and how they would score from 1-5 in participation. For some reason, I really had to bug them to fill it out, and even still I only got about 3/4th of the forms back. It was completely anonamous, but maybe they would respond better to this kind of this if participation wasn't part of their grade? That way we could introduce the importance of self-reflection and group communication in a more neutral setting before doing anything grade-related.
When we started our second project later in the week, which was all about creative writing, I was faced with an interesting challenge. There has been a ton of construction going on at Cedar directly beneath our room, and it was absolutely deafening on one particular day. Luckily, we have a good relationship with our librarians, so I went down to ask if we could borrow some of the library space for class. They said yes, which was great, but it also meant that I had to figure out how to run class without 1. our usual space and materials 2. a presentation screen for my directions. Plus, this was a day that some great school drama was unfolding, so everyone in the building was extra distracted by trying to gossip. I ended up having to cut my whole-class directions pretty short, and instead worked with each table in more of a small-group way. The issue with this was that I couldn't get around enough to catch when students were stuck as quickly as if we were in the classroom and I had a more structured presentation to help guide our work session.
I also had an interesting social situation this week with a kid who isn't even my student anymore. She was in my class last semester, and usually comes to our room during lunch to hang out with her friends. I had a good relationship with her before, and I still really enjoy chatting with her. Their group was chatting about horror movies this week at lunch, and she called me into the conversation to ask whether or not I'd finally watched the movie she had recommended to me (Midsommar). I said that I hadn't (very busy) and she was all like "what, bitch!? we're not friends anymore!!" It seemed like she was 90% joking, but it still felt like crossing the line of familiarity with me. I tried to settle it by joking back that "we were never friends" (which is true, from my perspective), and went back to eating my lunch. She hasn't come around for lunch or advisement since then, and I'm a bit worried about her. I wasn't trying to be mean, and I want her to understand that adults who would accept being "friends" in this type of situation are probably not looking out for her best interests. This comes on the heels of an ex-teacher at Cedar getting fired over innapropriate relationships with his students, so of course I'm thinking about it extra hard. I'm wondering how to explain this responsibility to a teenager without sounding super condescending, because I think that will make them not take me seriously out of spite.
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