One of my sisters is also an art teacher and has made it her goal to expose her students to as much life and culture outside of their small town as possible. Expanding the student’s global community is an important part of our current culture with the workforce changing from local to international before our eyes. I cringe when I hear some of my students talk about traveling to the bordering state as if it was the experience of a lifetime. In the rural town I teach in, students often don’t have the means to take family trips far off places. They are lucky if they make the 2.5 hour drive to New York City once, in their high school career. While I can’t fund raise enough to allow each family in my school the opportunity to travel, I can do my best to expose the students to foreign culture and give them a taste of what life is like in other parts of the world. The project is simple. So many of us already do 2 point perspective projects. This one encourages the students to learn about a different place and the culture they would experience there, and apply this knowledge to create a restaurant design. This is one of those projects that really incorporates a lot of design thinking. Students have to learn about the country, decide where their restaurant will be located and make a lot of key decisions from there. Many of the students struggle initially with the idea that a 5 star restaurant might not be the best choice for a developing country. Project Essential Questions How can we get students excited about the culture that exists in other parts of the world? How can educators connect drawing with key math vocabulary words? Students will know and be able to. . . • Understand math concepts and vocabulary associated with perspective drawing. • Interesting facts about a country that they knew little about prior to the assignment. • Conceptualize facts about a country in order to design a restaurant inspired by the country of study. • Practice shading techniques using a light source and cross-hatching. • Be exposed to the basics of landscape architecture. • Study the architect Frank Gehry and discuss his work. Here's the lesson:
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I was recently at a party to celebrate a high school teenager's birthday with my husband. The gathering was pretty well split, with the adults congregating in one area and the teenagers peacefully keeping their own space in another. At one point I noticed a puzzled expression on my husband's face as he watched the teens chatting away. As he soaked in the adolescence, he remarked how rarely he is around this age group and how quickly one can forget what it is like to be a teenager. I snickered as I often do when I want him to know how hard my job is; and I thought how opposite a high school teacher's world is to other adults. Those of us that work in high schools can't escape the sights, sounds, and smells of teenage years. It has become the norm to witness all of their quirky behaviors and we forget sometimes how the rest of the world deals with daily experiences. I truly enjoy teaching this age group. I love that my students can simultaneously LOVE and HATE everything, and that making a mountain out of a mole hill is as common as getting out of bed in the morning. Most of the time I have patience for the stubbornness they throw at me, however, over the years I have been consistently disappointed when students fail to show gratitude. I hold the door open for them; they walk through. I hand out paper with really useful, well-thought-out information for their little brains to soak in; they groan. I bring in a box of donuts to celebrate the end of a big project; they scarf them down without ensuring that everyone received one. My knowledge of this age group armors me with understanding, however I find that saying "thank you" is the least of my concerns. I fear that students in this age group are having a difficult time feeling gratitude enough to understand that they can show it. This concern prompted one of the lessons in my Life Skills unit. Depending on the materials available, the end product is either a terrarium or a sculptural card. The lesson requires discussion, or it may become a superficial exercise in merely saying thank you. My goal is to give the students the opportunity to think about the things in their lives that they feel grateful for in a deeper way than the common thanksgiving day project. I often ask my students what are some of the things in their lives that they feel they can't live without. I encourage them to reflect on the reason they would be affected by this absence. More often than not, it comes down to a handful of people that the students feel strongly grateful for. They observe that there are little and big things that they can show gratitude for and find that if they do it more, it may come back to them as well. This project can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. The result might be a slightly more polite group of teenagers with really cool sculptural cards or you may help a few kids get through their teenage years feeling really grateful for their mountains and molehills. Here's the lesson.
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