#workshop reflection

The main weakness with this lesson was with the materials we chose for the students to work with -- functional art can be created with many mediums, however, our choice in demonstrating how to weave was helpful but perhaps in a way that was more open-ended. When there are options for projects in our lesson, our students tend to group together and all follow a similar idea at first since the class is so small. Some students always break off and do something unique, which is healthy, but I want to make the space more open to that in the future. Which materials are used for the project can help with that, too, as well as stronger teacher samples.  Our discussion for this lesson was great though, and the introduction activity of designing a funky chair got the students thinking about what art is really, and how maybe a fork can be art too. 

The main issue we had with this lesson was how messy the gesso got for covering the sculptures -- but it honestly wasn’t that bad. The students responded well to the idea of pushing the nylon to its limits, and the balloon hook we had worked really well. The one student with the ridiculous look on her face had me cracking up like crazy for this workshop, her humor reminds me of my own except she’s funnier and only 7. Sometimes I wonder at times that I should restrict my laughter, regardless of what the joke and the situation is; I’m a person that likes to laugh, but I never can know other students that I may offend by laughing. We were mostly talking about farts throughout the class, but still you never know. We are going to be finishing the lesson up next week after the gesso layers dry on the sculptures, the students were very excited about ideas and concepts for the shapes they saw in their sculptures. I was impressed with how creative they were right off the bat, but the one worry I have is that those concepts may be awesome but not 100% related to the form and volume ideas we were teaching. I think we have to be careful about how we remind them of the project next time, rather than letting them just paint willy nilly.