"And the students have spoken"

I had a chance to talk to the issue of GRADES today while 2nd periiod was at lunch...my ramblings..

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next".

Jonas Salk

I had a great talk with my daughter, Kateri, last evening about this blog.  She brought a couple of things to my attention and suggested a couple of things that I found insightful and interesting.  I'm planning to incorporate some of her thoughts and ideas into my future blogs.  I believe you will enjoy them as much as I will.

Kateri said she would really like to hear from the students how "things are going" with this new type of class we're doing.  You know, I have never bothered to ask my students how they felt about what we did.  I don't know but what I must have thought that if they weren't enjoying my class they would let me know and just left it at that.  But today I decided to ask.  I said, "write me a few sentences that lets me know how you felt at the beginning, in the middle, and now that we are nearing the end how you feel/felt about this lesson.  As I read their comments, I was BLOWN AWAY by their responses.  I'm going to scan some in and post them to this and some subsequent posts.  I also plan to continue using this format to elicit this kind of response throughout the year.

As you can see, the students sound as though they are enjoying the lesson and having a feeling of real accomplishment out of creating their artwork.  I couldn't be more pleased.  Perhaps I'll include one of these notes in each of my blogs for the rest of the lesson.  In the meanwhile, I did take some pictures today of a couple of works that are finished or very close.