Sara E. Thomas
I teach visual art at High School in the Community (HSC), a small urban magnet school. HSC is a unique teaching environment because we are a teacher run school. This means that we do not have the administrative hierarchy of a typical public school. We are run by a "teacher democracy" where the body of teachers elects a facilitator, a student membership coordinator and two officers to run the office. Teachers at HSC fill all of these positions. Each position with the exception of the facilitator includes regular classroom teaching. This benefits the entire school because all of the people holding administrative positions have been elected to those positions and are still active in the classroom, unlike in most public schools. Each teacher plays an integral role in the operation of the school. We are all encouraged to create our own curriculum in alignment with both the Connecticut and New Haven teaching standards. I have a large amount of freedom designing my courses so I try to create courses that will engage my students, integrate with other subjects and relate to their lives personally.
HSC is a magnet school serving three hundred and fifty students. Two-thirds of the students are from New Haven and are selected through a lottery process. The other third of our population are students from surrounding suburban areas who choose to come to HSC instead of attending their local public high school. This selection process creates an extremely diverse community of students from a variety of different backgrounds. In our school the student population is roughly one-third white, one-third black and one-third Latino. A majority of the two-thirds from New Haven are in a low socio-economic class, while many of the suburban students are from middle class families and their parents are attracted to HSC because of its small size. They feel that students will be more easily accepted by their peers and they will receive more one on one instruction. Each individual brings an extremely different set of experiences with him or her, creating a wonderful and sometimes challenging classroom environment.
Students attending HSC are required to take one full credit of art (some combination of visual art and music). This requirement sends many students through my door and finding a way to reach them all and keep them interested is one of my favorite challenges. Along with a diverse population there is a staggering imbalance in their art knowledge. Some of the students have a strong art background, while others have not had art for over three years. This occurs as the result of students being filtered in from many different school districts with different requirements for their students. It forces me to teach the basic elements and principles of design while also making them interesting to those students for whom they are review.
The one class that attracts almost every student is Cartooning. The appeal of cartooning is that while you need to know the basics, everything does not have to be perfect because cartoons are often purposefully exaggerated. This class appeals to students with little art background because they can learn figure drawing, but they can create a successful cartoon at their own drawing level. It also appeals to students with strong drawing skills because many of them have already created their own characters, which they can perfect and refine through this class. This year I took the cartooning one step further and started teaching a stop animation course. The course runs for one quarter and meets everyday for and hour and twenty-five minutes. This course also appeals to a variety of students, for the same reasons as the cartooning course. It is extremely similar in design, except in the stop animation course students learn to sculpt their characters, and also learn the latest computer technology to create short movies. The course starts with students writing their own script, creating a frame-by-frame storyboard of their script and doing character sketches. Next students move from two dimensions to three dimensions by constructing a moveable model of their characters and constructing an environment for their character. Once this is complete students learn the basics camera angles and using a digital camera to film their own stop animation short.
