New School Year, New Schools....4 of them!!

After a rollercoaster of a summer, multiple interviews and no results, I finally landed a job teaching art! I am now teaching one section of the Visual Arts course at Summit Public Schools. As part of the Expeditions program, students experience mini-intersessions for one or two week periods that allow in-depth exploration of a topic. The Visual Arts course is broken into two sections: Drawing & Painting and 2D/3D Design, with students attending one section in the morning for 2.5 hours with a 15 minute break and then the other in the afternoon for another 2.5 hours with a ten minute break.


I rotate between four charter high schools: Shasta in Daly City, Rainier in San Jose, and Everest & Summit Preparatory in Redwood City. Most students are freshman or sophomores, with a junior acting as a teaching assistant/independent study at Summit and several seniors thrown in. Since I have not taught high school yet it has been quite a learning curve, but I am enjoying the challenge and reward of it so far. For most students, this is the last (possibly only) art course they will take, so the curriculum combines some of the fun projects from middle school with the format and experiences gained as a freshman illustrator at Ringling College of Art + Design.

This month I have been at each school for one week, focusing on establishing expectations, learning how to draw themselves in proportion, head-to-toe, exploring optical and linear perspective, and plenty of drawing in sketchbooks. They are given prompts to start the class with sketching, moving on to "freebies" of their own choice for extra credit in the time given. After sketchbook work, students are taught a new lesson or concept and use the remaining time to complete the activity, such as optical perspective drawings of a desert or one-point perspective abstract shapes. The culminating project for this first week is a two-point perspective drawing of a store front. Students followed along to establish the general layout of stores, using the ruler and try adding doors/windows in perspective. They then were encouraged to be creative and personalize their buildings. Here are some more examples!