NVU Class Reflections

Practicum II Documentary Practicum II - 9/22/2025 The students have been behaving roughly the same. The first class had shown the effects of waking up to a Monday morning. Students were visibly more tired than I've seen them on a Wednesday. Miss N gave me a few more pointers on student behavior. Some students don't have a good home environment. So when they come back after a weekend, they can be more emotional than a typical day at school.  Between class times, she also mentioned what to avoid regarding political subjects. She mentioned that some students will repeat what they hear or see without knowing the meaning or controversy. Students are offered to go to the guidance room to speak about politics. Whether it is to understand more or to have some feelings out in a more appropriate environment. It is also discouraged to assume the staff members' politics or share leaning political beliefs on social media. I understood, but explained that I wouldn't talk about politi...

Final Course Reflection for Partnering Adolescent Learners This is a working theory on how to teach students the right directions in a lesson. In my second lesson, not only have I given an example of what I do want them to paint. I gave them examples of what I did not want them to paint.  In the collaboration grid, I assigned students to take a piece of a giant picture and design it in a way that references the original image. I told them that they could go for realism. If they didn't want to go for realism, the shapes needed to be the same. I gave another example showing that going too abstract would make the image so unrecognizable, that I could move it to another spot on the picture and it wouldn't change anything.  They all tried to replicate the colors as closely as possible, and almost every student tried to mimic the shapes and proportions. One student didn't get the scale right, but he was doing good with the colors and proportions.  For some students, just h...

     Course Evaluation      Course subjects      I enjoyed having documentaries to watch in this class. This isn't something new to me, as this is a similar experience I had at Eco-Human Experience. However, if there's a video teaching me on a subject with firsthand encounters and experiences, I can't complain. It is easier to make an opinion when I get to see the story as it is, rather than it being an outsider's interpretation. The readings were fine. It was lengthy, but it did provide some knowledge on the subjects in question.            One assignment I look back nearly satisfied with is when we had to plan our final. We were told to think of scenarios for the final. I was pretty fixed on what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about tolerance/acceptance of [other] religious beliefs. It's been a topic hovering over my head for a while. With how some college students in Johnson openly or subtly dis...

     Course Evaluation      Course subjects         This art class made me try different methods that I had never experimented with before. I enjoyed making the collage out of a history book and painting it onto a canvas. I took a neighborhood landscape full of houses, and I added facial features to the house from another page of the book. I also gave it hands and a key that swung across one finger. I called it "Humanization". I kept the grayscale from the book, but then I made the house in the middle of the portrait colorful and vibrant to form a contrast. I consider it one of my best hidden-meaning pieces.       I also had a piece where I was putting two pieces together that followed the theme of "polar opposites". I didn't want to follow something cliche which doesn't speak for me. I settled for something that felt personal to me. For the top of the portrait, I had an orange VHS tape with the film coming out. I cho...

  Course Reflection      Course subjects         Most of my assignments depended on reading, and asking me to explain new words with my own interpretation of their meaning. This helped me rehearse what I read and helped me build my vocabulary around the subject of inventive thinking. Including new definitions like "KWL reading" which means "What I know, What I want to know, and What I learned.". Learning strategies such as this help open a variety of choices that could teach students in unique, effective ways. Outside of acronyms, I also learned about Jigsaw grouping which was the idea of mixing groups with different fields of knowledge to exchange thoughts to build onto one idea or to give each other lessons on multiple subjects. I like this method because it encourages students to get into groups and learn more from each other. This also gets them to socialize more with people their age and learn stuff from each other that may not know from...

 Printmaking Final Critique      Project #1: The Blue Dalmatian This is my first project making two-tone prints in this class. Out of the few that I have made, this is one of the best turnouts. There were two challenges I had regarding this project. For starters, since I was using the same block to make the second layer, I needed not to take off what wanted to keep. It required a lot of "backward thinking", and any mess-ups were irreversible.  What was also a challenge was aligning the brick on top of the paper so both prints were layered together perfectly. This was the closest I got to perfect. If there was something I could do to make this better, I would have removed more linoleum on the edges, so they printed in unwanted areas. I would have also been more careful about carving around the tail. On the middle bottom of the tail, it looks like a smaller animal bit into it. That wasn't an intentional detail.  Besides that, I liked this project as I can ass...