Yesterday, I met the teacher I will be student teaching with after spring break.  She seems great!  I will be teaching Photo I, sculpture, ceramics and jewelry.  I am a 2D person, so it will be good to get experience in all of these 3D subjects.  However, I don't really know how to go about planning lessons for these subjects that I don't know too much about. If you have any ideas or favorite sculptors let me know.

The elementary teacher I'm with now is a good teacher, but very disorganized.  She even admits to hoarding and a lack of ability to organize things. My first week, she did a lot of lessons in a spur-of-the-moment fashion.  Needless to say, I cannot teach lessons that way (maybe after a few years of experience I will be able to).  I am learning a lot though, elementary lessons are fun to plan. I just started a clay monster lesson with 3rd graders, and we prepared by listening to In the Hall of the Mountain King and prowling/hopping/sneaking about the room acting like monsters, a.k.a. awesomeness.  Sixth graders just made clay superheroes which turned out great as well.

I can't wait to have my own classroom!

Having clean laundry is like Christmas!

It's all folded into beautiful piles, and it's like you have all new clothes, except you don't have to try them on again, and you like all of them!

Bonus points for being warm when the come out of the dryer.

It's, it's and its

Ok, it may be just me, but I feel like "it's" and "its" should both be written "it's". I think that English speakers are smart enough to differentiate between the two based on context clues.

Point 1: Based on the normal rules of English "its" should mean: more than one it. What if I was writing about Cousin It and his relatives. how would you distinguish the Its (the It family) with "its"? Very confusing.

Point 2: Grammar rules generally suggest that an apostrophe+s is how you make something possessive. Are there any other exceptions to this rule?

Tell me, who is going to get confused when you write, "the dog couldn't find it's bone." Would you be confused?

English is ridiculous sometimes.

The other day I was thinking, when getting to know one another, people often ask what kind of music that person likes. I think it should also be a fair question to ask what type of art one likes.

You could answer in terms of subject matter: realistic or abstract, figurative or non-figurative. By media: sculpture, painting, photography, ceramics, etc. Or movement: impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism, pop art, icons, conceptual art, etc.

you know what I mean? It just seems a little unfair to only apply this type of question to music. I guess you could apply it to drama, poetry and literature as well. Possibly this is a question of why are we so caught up in music when there are so many other forms of art/entertainment to discuss.

I just don't feel like knowing what kind of music a person likes gives you a well rounded idea of who they are.

It's Fall!

Kristen and I have decided to train for a Thanksgiving 5k, so we are following six week plan to go from not running to a 5k. Today's workout included a 3-5 mile walk, so we decided to take some photos along the way. About 1/16th of a mile into the journey, I found a mirror in a trash pile. It was a nice mirror and rather large, so I decided to adopt it as my own. Here are a few photos from the day:

Our sidewalk


Sweet gumball


The sidewalk


Isn't my new mirror beautiful?


I couldn't turn this one.

I love fall.

These are a few paintings from the most recent series that I have been working on. The tree silhouettes were inspired by the beautiful old oak tree that is in my grandparents' front yard.

My Bochie (this is what we call our grandmas in our extended family, I believe the word is some toddler's mis pronunciation of the Polish word for grandma) just passed away this past November. Her birthday was Valentine's Day, so these memories are again fresh in my mind. I have never really experienced the death of someone so close to me before, and although grieving has been a painful experience, it has also made me more aware of who I am and who I want to be. My memories of her have also provided me with inspiration for my work, and doing the work is healing in itself.

When I was painting these last semester, I was really busy, and I was double booked, so I didn't actually attend my painting class, so my teacher didn't see my work until the end of the semester, and when I told her about my inspiration, she surprised me by saying that just by looking at them, she could tell that they were about death and the afterlife. I guess tree images do have a lot of symbolism attached to them, but I was surprised to hear her say that. Apparently art can speak about the artist in ways I couldn't have expected.

An update on the lucky penny search: I have more than a dollar, which is pretty exciting.

Also, I'm not a good blog updater because I'm afraid I'll be boring, and I'm not very funny, and I just don't feel like I have any interesting things to write about.

If you are reading this, and have any suggestions, let me know.