What the art teacher did (outside of lesson times)

Art teachers are maybe not the most high-profile members of the teaching team in a school.  But perhaps more than most subject areas they are called on for extra input and support.  In fact, I often ponder the irony of teaching a subject area where pupils and parents often make the observation that there is no work to be found in choosing to study art, whilst I seem to be continually busy with my employer making full use of me (a fine art graduate) to carry out any number of creative tasks.  There clearly seems to be plenty of call for creative input and practical skills where I am!

I know I’m not stating anything new to most arts teachers.  We are requested to do so many tasks outside of the normal classroom activities.  There might be scenery needed for the school play, a poster for a party, a logo for a club, decoration or artworks needed for an empty corridor, an exhibition of pupils’ work to be organised for PR purposes, a design for a t-shirt or maybe critical input on the school’s prospectus or website.  I could go own, but I’m sure that you get the picture.

At my own school, amongst other things, I seem to have become the second line of graphic design.  We have an external bureau that designs material for us, but I am regularly asked to contribute with a poster, a flyer or animation film.  All areas I have no specialist training in but am interested to try my hand and have, over the years put in the hours learning to use the necessary software.

As with all design tasks, it always seems to take a lot longer than I expect to get to the final finished result, and a lot lot longer than most other people seem to think the process of design can take.  So why do it?  Well, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I enjoy the process and the challenge.  I’m not sure that I could design in this way full time, but the occasional work on the side is both interesting and satisfying when designs reach their final form.

A case in point are the five display boards that show our school history (it is our 75th anniversary).  I have put these together in collaboration with a colleague from the history department.  They are a combination of an interesting text, fascinating historical photographs and, even if I say it myself, some nice design work.  This time the finished product is going to stand outside of school for the next year, which is considerably longer than most other similar projects seem to last in the public eye!

The things they didn’t mention during teacher training – no.21, the long range school trip

I wrote this a few weeks ago, but in the chaos and confusion of the week that followed I forgot to post it.

I did my training to be a teacher quite a while back. I enjoyed it and learnt a whole load of useful things that I still make use of and a few completely useless things. I can remember a lot of the workshops, presentations, seminars, reports and exams like they were yesterday. What I also realize now is that there are many things that feature in education that never got a mention and yet are, in terms of my own perception of things, pretty big issues one way or another.

I’m about to embark on a five day school trip. I know that the week ahead will feature a few such experiences. Let me start with the traveling in the bus experience.

We are traveling with about 115 pupils, aged 11-13. We are setting off at 6.30 in the morning, we’ll be reaching our destination at about 7 in the evening. We’re going to be traveling in two buses starting our journey in the central Netherlands and finishing near Swindon in England. The day also involves an hour and a half on a ferry to cross the channel. Oh yes, we are traveling with a group of nine staff members.

None of the children involved are likely to have made such a trip before, and to say that they are excited, nervous and just generally wound up about it is something of an understatement! Keeping a lid on the excitement is kind of the order of the day. No energy drinks, only limited sweets during the course of the day and hopefully it will remain bearable for all.

Three hours into the journey and I’m no longer sitting next to one of my colleagues, I’m now sitting next to a particularly irritating voice in the bus, half way down the bus amongst the boys to apply a calming influence…..it works up to a point, but it does kind of take the experience of arguing children in the back of the car on a long drive to a whole new level. Only another nine hours to go before we reach our destination.

Ahead is a week of sleep deprivation. Calming 115 children down and getting them to go to sleep at the end of the day isn’t for the faint hearted! Shepherding them as a group through the Oxford town centre in the early evening rush hour isn’t either really. Dealing with the homesick children, the lost telephones, the occasional breakages of this and that, the little conflicts between increasingly tired children as the week goes on all can be added to the list.

It’s fair to say that this is fairly extreme educational experience. 16-18 hour working days for a week are pretty demanding, physically, emotionally and intellectually. Looking back it’s perhaps not so strange that nobody ever mentioned this during teacher training!

A rarity in education

I have worked in mainstream education for 17 years and I have just participated in something of a unique experience, a three day, uninterrupted training course for the very first time. In fact, since qualifying to teach, I have never had any more than a single isolated day of training and more often than not, any specific extra input comes in the form of just an afternoon clamped on the end of a morning of teaching. The reasons for this restriction is either financial or, and this is more often the case where I work, the fact that lessons for our pupils are cancelled. I understand this reasoning up to a point.  However, really the question in the end is; is the hugely limited and disjointed scope of on the job training in education actually not a far bigger problem than that of a number of cancelled lessons?

As it happens I haven’t been on the receiving end of the training during the first three days of this week. I have been giving the course, together with Cathy, a colleague form New Zealand to a group of ten other teachers from our school who will be teaching in English as part of our bilingual team for the first time after the summer break. It’s been a fantastic three days.  Hard work for all of those involved, challenging for many, fun, engaging, thought provoking and certainly good for team building. The progress made by the group has been amazing to see, confidence has been built and there is a growing belief that they really can teach their classes of Dutch twelve year olds using a good level of English.

The space we have been given this time has allowed us to deliver information, to use numerous didactic approaches, allow discussions to take place, create space for actual lesson material to be developed and presented and above all work on the verbal presentation skills that are necessary for a teacher teaching in a second language. What you might call a ‘critical learning mass’ has been built up and will hopefully be carried forward into the next school year. Way more common in education are training sessions that are offered in an intensive two to three hour session that throw a series of ideas at participants that work as a flash in the pan creating momentary enthusiasm only for the input to largely disapate due to a lack of follow up as the teacher is once again left to their own devices to try and find a way of making use of the material.  I’m a pretty conscientious worker but I recognize this tendency for good input is simply lost because it is offered initially in such an isolated island of training. So what would I propose as an improvement on the current situation? Well, on the basis of the last three days I would definitely say that twice a year, a training session of  two or three days could be fantastic and actually have the chance of producing something truly effective. Yes, the pupils would miss five days of lessons, but if the quality of the education on offer was significantly improved might that ground not simply be made up in another way? Schools have significant pools of experts and examples of good practice, but if we are honest it is mostly only the pupils who happen to be in the right classes who are the beneficiaries. The spreading and sharing of ideas, material and teaching skills is something that all educational institutions probably have to work on.

To bin or not to bin

Am I being over sensitive? It is the end of the school year, maybe I’m a bit worn out by it all, but this is a returning feature of the weeks leading up to the summer holiday.

The scenario goes like this. After a year of working with the various classes that I teach the chest of drawers and the shelves where I keep their work are getting rather full. The last week of term big clear up is just around the corner and so it is time to return the fruits of our art lessons back to the pupils. We normally do this in a frenzied fifteen minute session during the last lesson but one of the year. Pupils wander round the room with armfuls of drawings, paintings and collages, handing them out to classmates while I take care of the fragile three dimensional work. At the end of it all, each pupil has a small stack of their creative efforts of the past year on the table in front of them.

When I was new to the teaching business I just waited for the bell to go and the class got up and left. I’d then look round to discover a number of rejected ‘artworks’ deposited in the bin in the corner of the room. Like I said at the beginning, maybe I’m just being too sensitive and suffering from end of the year fragility. But after helping and coaxing, maybe less that talented pupils, to produce the best they could, I can’t help feeling strangely let down by the drawings in the bin…….they hadn’t even got through the door of the art room!

I kept all my artworks when I was at school, in fact I still have many of them even now! Although, I should be honest, I didn’t keep my maths, chemistry or biology books!

I can’t make my pupils keep their artistically rejected creations, I realize that. I do try to point out that maybe a mum or a dad back home may be interested in at least seeing them once. Most of the class do depart quite happily and voluntarily with their work, but for those who do plan to bin it instantly, I do have one fixed rule now, they are not allowed to leave in the bin in the art room it has to at the very least make it to the container outside our school. This way, their (perhaps overly sensitive teacher!) doesn’t have to scoop it out of one bin and then put it in another himself.

Christmas holiday, art teacher, iPad

Time to do what I’ve been encouraging my pupils to do all term, experiment and play a bit with their iPads.  A bit of pure iPad drawing.

For those interested in the technical details, it is made with Bamboo Paper to start with and then Brushes Redux.

Happy Christmas!

 

 

“Oh….. he was my old art teacher!”

I was reminded this week of something one of my tutors at art school once said to me. It was nothing too profound, but for one reason or another it did lodge itself in my memory.  It went something like this, “I like being the artist in the village where I live because I can go down the pub, have a few drinks and on the way back home fall in the ditch and nobody thinks much of it”, thanks Mike for those words of wisdom!

I suppose one of the reasons the comment stuck in my mind was that I didn’t really fully understand what he was getting at. On reflection I see now that he was placing himself in a kind of slightly romantic context of the artist living on the edge of regular society, someone who is expected to do slightly odd things from time to time.

I’ve never really seen myself as being someone on the edge of society, but I do accept fully that as both an artist and art teacher you do sometimes find yourself doing slightly odd things.

The reason this all came back to me this week was that for the second year in succession I found myself doing a little preparation work for a school trip we make with our first years (12-13 year olds). It’s a trip to a science museum of the human body made in the context of a cross curricular project week about sport and physical activity. My part as art teacher is to make kites with the pupils so that we can have a mass kite flying session on the nearby beach.

It all sounds great so far, but as any parent who’s flown kites with children will be able to relate, kites that don’t fly, aren’t fun. So both this year and last, I’ve found myself on a windy afternoon during the school holiday week in February trying to build easy to make, cheap and flyable kites from a few sticks and plastic bags.

I don’t mind doing this too much, I quite like the challenge, but I do feel pretty self conscious doing it. Remember these are not glamorous ‘power kites’, no, these are small kites made from plastic shopping bags, which at times have struggled to fly. Flying kites when alone can look a bit of a lonely affair at the best of times, and when you’re an adult and it looks like you are flying a plastic bag on a string, as indeed you are, it looks well…….maybe a bit weird!

Last year, when I was doing this I chose the quietest corner of the university campus in the town where I live and set to work, kind of hoping no one much would see me. Eventually my shopping bag with its stylish tale of more shopping bags was fluttering in a rather unstable wind on about twenty meters of string, maybe I could start thinking of heading for home.

Just at that moment I noticed a young woman biking towards me on a bike with a second one perched on the back of the same bike. I continued to concentrate on my plastic bags, feeling slightly embarrassed, hoping that they wouldn’t pay me too much attention. They got closer and suddenly came the call,

“Hey! Mr Sansom!”

It was Laura, one of my old pupils from the secondary school (in another town) where I teach who was now studying at the University. The funny thing was, she didn’t stop to talk, just biked on by, but as she did I heard her say to the other girl on the back of the bike as they passed,

“Oh….. he was my old art teacher” as if to excuse or explain my behaviour to her companion. I think I might have imagined her offering a shrug of her shoulders and rolling her eyes too, but I certainly had a better grasp about what Mike had meant about falling in the ditch and people kind of expecting you to do it.