The weekend once again, the time I beat my brain to figure out what to do for
the upcoming week. My students finished the still life projects. I'd say I
had maybe three decent final projects from my last period. Some of the
students simply chose not to complete them. They just didn't care about their
grade. They wanted to play around while I was trying to help the students who
actually wanted to fix their drawings and learn how to shade. Several of the
students were still horrible, and I could not get them to clean up. They just
throw things on the floor, leave their projects on the table or on the floor.
They are complete slobs. I was furious. After the class, I marched down to the
Dean's office and asked her once again for some advice. She said that it was
time to talk to some of the students who were giving me problems. I spent
twenty minutes gathering all of the documentation on those students, the essays,
notes home, notes from parent calls...I was amazed at the size of the stack
of papers from that one class after four weeks.
Now I'm trying to decide what to do on Monday. I'm thinking that I might
only allow those students who have been good do an art project while making the
others complete a written assignment. Perhaps I'll simply pick out the
students who are acting out (there will probably be about 10 of them) and tell them
that they have lost their privilege to do art? I'm even thinking about moving
the good students to two or three tables on one side of the room so that I can
teach to them. I don't believe that the troublemakers deserve to do art in
my classroom right now, yet I don't want to punish the whole class any more.
The contracts that I make them write really aren't working all that well...so
I'm thinking of giving them other written assignments that will be worth a
grade.
I'm trying to decide on a project for next week...something easy, something
fun...I'd like to get them playing with color now...so I'm going to look into
the color wheel projects. I'm not sure if I'm ready to get them going in paint
just yet...perhaps an oil pastel project first or a collage type thing.
