Week 6 Peer Responses

To Katie
I agree with Amy completely!  You don't sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist because it's not so much a conspiracy as a cold hard truth that creative, independent thought is a threat to the status quo.  It has always been so, which is why brilliant thinkers have been persecuted throughout history, particularly in times of struggle and change.  What's amazing is that the creative spirit endures despite all attempts to stifle it.  In fact, it only gets stronger when faced with adversity.

To Erika
What a cool lesson!  I love this idea and I hope you don't mind if I utilize it in the future.  It's interesting that you chose to do this exercise with surrealist art because the writing activity you created is basically the "exquisite corpse" game, which was invented by surrealist artists.  For the second year in row at the Art League, we are doing a show called "interpretations" which pairs artists with writers and asks them to respond to one another's work.  The way it works is, 40 writers and 40 artists submit an original piece of work.  We then pair them up, and each artist and writer has several months to create a second piece responding to their partner's work.  Your lesson would be a really cool way to translate that concept into the classroom and teach about surrealism at the same time.  Is it a coincidence, intuition, or just great minds thinking alike, that I went a very similar route with our visiting student groups from Lee elementary as well as the art teachers I had in for a PD day during that show.  They loved it!

Also, I think the way you handled your upset student and didn't let that derail the entire class is impressive.  As a young teacher, I would have been totally thrown off by a student crying.  I think you did the right thing by taking a moment to talk with her, giving her the time and space she needed, and getting back in the game, because you have 20 (or how ever many) other students to think about as well.  And Katie's right in saying that it's difficult to see everything as it's happening.  Watching the video, in hindsight, you were LOOKING for signs of where things went wrong for this student because you already know that a problem occurred.  In the moment, without that prior knowledge, it would have been very difficult to anticipate and we often don't want to draw too much attention to a situation that might be working itself out.  Making a big scene about some minor little conflict can sometimes just make it worse or more embarrassing for the student.