Halloween Jokes, Draconian Pick-up Lines and The Difference Between Fire Alarms and Smoke Alarms

First of all, my new life, or better stated renewed life, as Mr. Bates rocks (at least from my perspective - students, parents and administrators may argue otherwise, but I'm loving my teaching job - now I just hope I can keep it.)
Last Friday (Oct. 30th) the day before Halloween, with half the school dressed in costumes and with my English students coming to my class straight off a Thriller pep assembly, I decided to make a quick judgement call... switch plans for writing paragraphs on the Holocaust in the writing lab to Halloween Jokes and Draconian Pick-up lines in my classroom. After all, if our language isn't to help us laugh and woo and find love, then what a waste of a language.
I'm big on atmosphere, so I killed the lights, shut the windows, got some music pumping thru my surround sound, and found and old flickery black and white Frankenstein movie on YouTube to project on my wall. I happened to have our industrial strength smoke machine in the car and thought - why not? I greeted students with music blaring, smoke billowing and me bellowing through my classroom mic, "Whaahhhhh hahhhh ha hahhhh... Welcome to English helllllllll! Whaahhhhhh hahhhhh ha hahhhhhh... I had students (and a few teachers) from all over the English wing sticking their heads in to see what was going on.
The bell rang, I toned down the music and started into my spiel on the language of laughter and wooing ...
We started talking about the craft of joke writing and I was working down my list of 21 duck jokes I wrote for my daughter, Piper. Each time I told a new joke I'd hit the smoke button as a sort of ba-dum-bum after the punchlines. I got to number seventeen: Why shouldn't you ever tell a duck a secret?
By this point the fog was so thick that students had opened the windows and door, and smoke was pouring out into the parking lot and hallway. There was so much smoke you could barely see across the classroom. Still I couldn't resist... When I hit the punchline, Because they always quack under pressure, I hit the smoke button and as expected more smoke and droll laughter poured into the building.
Then came the unexpected: a heart-stopping shrill-pitched pulse and flashing red light cut through the mists of darkness and froze the entire room. In fact, for an instant the entire student body and school community froze. 1500 mouths stopped moving and hearts stopped beating. With a punch line, a puff of smoke and an invisible trigger, I had inadvertently silenced them all. It was a perfectly pregnant pause.
From my precarious position of the incident's epicenter I'm fairly certain I was the first to breathe and when I did I expired with two syllables that set the whole Logan High universe spinning into chaos...
"Oh, sh....t!"
An explosion of laughter roared out of my classroom, out the windows and down the hall, and in an instant adrenaline and bedlam raced through the hallowed halls of the school!
In a flash I was thru my students and out my door. The scene in the hallways was like a disaster film. Silhouettes of students racing in all directions through a dusty fog of smoke. Befuddled teachers misdirecting their students from one wrong exit to the other.

I was in deep sh...moke! In my enthusiasm for my cheeky punchlines and the untapped potential of laughter and love in the English language, I had filled the entire English wing with smoke.
As students poured out around me, I choked back into the eye of the storm and dove for my desk phone. I followed my shaky finger down the emergency phone list taped to my file cabinet and punched in the office extension. Someone said hello and I blubbered out an explanation about smoke and laughter and love, oh yeah, and the fire alarm that might actually be a false alarm that might just trace back to my room and a malfunctioning smoke machine... and I hung up as quickly as possible.
As the smoke settled and students returned to their classes, and I did my best to settle my class back to order and get on with the serious business of the day... writing Halloween jokes and Draconian pick-up lines, the reports started trickling in. One of my students had been in the lunch room, "They shut the whole place down. They put down the iron curtains and stopped serving food and everything." From a student passing through the lobby, "The special ed kids were all going wild..."
From the administration, so far nothing.
Inside my head, two syllables keep echoing, "Oh..."




A aside: It's Monday morning as I'm writing this and mid-entry the fire inspector came into my room looking for a fire alarm that was tripped on Friday... I haven't yet heard from the administration, but I'm guessing they won't be far behind the fire inspector. In defense I'm going to send them back to my job application packet where I spell out my philosophy on education (which is featured earlier in this blog) and remind them that it's not my fault they didn't see the smoke coming - after all, as the old saying goes, "Where's there's smoke, there's fire." Only in this case, there was really only smoke that wasn't even really smoke.

My portrait of Theo in his fedora. My first real attempt at a value drawing. Brilliant? Not yet, but there is hope.

Art Camp II - Mary K
Two weeks till I transition back into life as Mr. Bates.
Just spent the most wonderful week in a Basic Drawing class with Mary Kierkseik. Going in I was a hack at best. Coming out I'm a hack with skills. There were a few of us giving our hands a real go for the first time this week, so it was a perfect test for her teaching methods and the sequences of techniques she ran us through. In the end our creations were quite remarkable. Mary will be sending out a CD of photos from the class and when she does I'll post pics.

My Masterpiece Value Project is a study of Theo in his fedora and a bow tie. The reference photo was way washed out, which created problems, but despite that I'm thrilled with what it became. Did I nail it? No, but in it's own right, it's respectable. Had I chosen a reference with more detail, I'm certain I could have done better, but hey, in the end I got skills and it shows. Without the class, I can't even imagine where I would have ended up trying to teach my Foundations of Art classes.

Casey Jones, the digital art teacher from Sky View, wandered around the class not wanting to leave after he had finished his project (a fly rod, reel, and boots still life), because he couldn't believe that he had actually created the image he held in his hands. Everyone that progressed through the class turned out a technically complex, remarkably crafted works of art. The line-up of drawings on the last day was brilliant.

As for Mary Kierkseik, if ever there is a chance to spend a moment of life with her, take it. Bright, delightful, talented, funny and full of life. She exudes enthusiasm for everything she does. Not to mention the girl can teach art.

As for my impending debut as an art teacher, this was the perfect week. Thanks to Lee Burningham for putting his arm around me the day we met and making sure I got into these classes. And thanks to Zan Burningham for inviting me into her wacky world and infusing me with her passion for teaching real skills not fluff. I'm feeling so good about my place in art department. So good.

One final chant for Mary, "Art is great! Art is great! Art is great! Art is great!...!!!"

Shading, Not Shading, Familiarity and More Shading

hey lover, slipped out for a little time to stop looking down at my paper and thought it's been too much time away with too many people in between us for the last few days. miss you and send you love. i really just feel like a chick cracking out of his shell here. or maybe a little beyond that. maybe more of a still wet colt stumbling up to his feet. sort of frozen on the virge of falling, but then finding my feet again. i'm a little tired of new things for a while. i need the relaxation of running on a trail i've run before where i know the curves and dips so that my mind can just relax and enjoy the wind. this cycle of everything new every day is exhausting. maybe that's why I've stepped out of the art room to play with words for a few moments. just to let them tumble off the ends of my fingers. it's a peaceful place for me. thanks for being so beautifully familiar. in that flash of a thought i understand something new about us, and it's wonderful. now back to my shading. i send you love. david

Art Camp

So I've been hired to teach Foundations of Art at Logan High starting in the fall. I get art. I have studied art and art history. I've always thought I would be a decent artist, sort of like writing before I had actually ever written, if I ever took the time to master the craft. Starting in the fall either I am an artist or a faker, so I'm choosing to be an artist.

Last week I spent 5 days in a intensive prep class for art teachers. As part of the experience I had to teach a 20 minute lesson. The challenge of this was hugely intriguing because I haven't actually ever had an art (how to draw, paint, sculpt) class and all of my peers (fun to have artistic peers) had art degrees and have been teaching art for some time.

My goal was to figure out a way to teach a highly complex skill in a way that none of them had ever thought of and in a way that got everyone out of their seats and having a great time. In short I pulled it off.

From my lesson plan:

THE ABSOLUTE BEST AND WORST LESSON PLAN

OF MY LONG AND DISTINGUISHED ART TEACHING CAREER
DEDICATED FOREVER TO ZAN BURNINGHAM AND MONICA BRIGHT,

THE QUEENS OF SEQUENTIAL LEARNING

lesson goal:

1. within 20 minutes teach students to reduce complex compositions featuring multiple figures to simple stick-figure line drawings. the desired outcome is that they will be able to do so by deconstructing works of the masters and by drawing from live model compositions. they will then be able to reconstruct their renderings using simple shapes and forms.

2. focus on hip position and linking head to the hips.

3. prepare students to complete a class portrait.

4. break bad hand habits and achieve more fluid and intuitive drawing techniques.

5. continue progress in mastering knowledge of the masters - neo-classicism

By the end of class I had 11 teachers operating as a human machine and the other 11 completing a rough sketch of the whole composition in less than 3 minutes. Am I boasting... A little bit I guess. But the beauty of it was when I asked Zan, who is a phenomenal artist and who has been teaching art for 19 years if she had ever been taught or actually taught to draw using my method. She hadn't. And then followed up with, "As you were teaching what you were teaching, Monica and I were sitting in the back of the room saying to each other, 'This would really work.' I'm going to use it from now on when I teach gesture drawing."

You know why the Yankees always win, Frank?

Frank Abagnale Sr.: You know why the Yankees always win, Frank?
Frank Abagnale, Jr.: 'Cause they have Mickey Mantle?
Frank Abagnale Sr.: No, it's 'cause the other teams can't stop staring at those damn pinstripes.
Catch Me If You Can - Christopher Walkin to Leo DeCaprio

Such a perfect line. If all things are equal, but one side looks like success and the other does not; all things are not equal.