Proud Educator

Today's my first blog post in two years in my teaching profession. Too bad, I don't exactly have a position to say that it is a profession. However the last few months that I've been long-term subbing at CMS, still counts for my experience as an art teacher. Today, was a momentous day for me as an educator: I inspired my student to enjoy art :)

This coming weekend is Mother's Day and I had the students choose either to do a free-choice project or to create a mother's day card. Majority decided to make a card for their mothers, step-moms, aunts, grandmothers, etc. In order to teach these students of composition and text organizations, I created a card for my own mother. I always believe that good examples will inspire great works from students. And who can make great examples? Me, of course! As a perfectionist, artist, and an art teacher, I can create examples that are exquisite, yet inspirational, for my students, I hope.

My mom loves sunflowers and to show students that hand-made cards are great cards (and doesn't have to be bought), I made a sunflower card. I free-hand drew four sunflowers, each symbolizing a member of my family (to show the students that it's great to make things personalized), and colored it in. It turned out well. So when I completed the cover of the card and showed it to my students, they were wowed by it (pats back). The next three days students were to create a rough draft of their cards, make a larger version of it on a heavier paper, and decorate it with various mediums.

One student, a happy over-achiever with great artistic potential, saw mine and wanted to make a similar card since her mother, too, loves sunflowers. Using a picture that I found online for her, she drew two sunflowers on the cover of her card. She created a border like I suggested to the students, and composed the sunflowers away from the center to give them an interesting design. As she started coloring her card in, the card started to come to life. She colors and colors, and it's turning out beautiful. She steps back, still only halfway finished, and exclaims, "I'm not good at art, but I LOVE it!"

 No teacher can ever deny the satisfying, humbling, ethereal emotions that bubbles up within them, when a student says something like that, the enjoyment and pleasure they feel from learning and announcing them. I became a teacher because I wanted to share my love of art to other people, especially children. Today I feel like I really succeeded as an educator. When my student looked at her work, and was amazed by her own skills that she didn't even know she had, and discovered that she is good at, it made my day happier. I'm elated still that I can make a student say, "I love art." It's one thing to be a great artist, but it's another thing to LOVE it. I was able to channel one of students natural talent into passion. I can't be more proud of my student and myself than this moment. It made the rest of my day, my week, this year, all worth it.

No More Books! Blame the Internet and Amazon!

by Susie Kim

July 18, 2011

Today is a sad, catastrophic day: it is the beginning of the book-meltdown revolution. As you may have hear, Borders Group, the corporation that controls Borders Bookstore, has announced that they will be liquidating their remaining 400 stores, taking away 11,000 positions from their employees. California's unemployment rate just went down too! I am not sure if these people will be able to receive their unemployment checks.

This is when technology, the almighty literacy haven, becomes a nightmare for people with jobs in the literature/ writing industry. With the closure of Borders nation-wide, publishing companies will print less books to save money; why would they print the same amount, when one of the leading book distributor has gone down? Amazon and Barnes and Nobles are the last remaining book companies and the internet isn't really helping with its free and easily accessible collection of informative resources.

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day to buy a book... it was $17.95. With my teacher- 25% discount, it would be about $15. So I decided I would save my money and look for it online, which I did. I would've preferred the book but why pay at all if I can attain the same or about the same amount of information online for free? Now I feel guilty about not buying that book... my purchase would probably have saved a person's job. But at a time like this when unemployment rate is high, and people are living paycheck-to-paycheck (like me), it is hard to think about others when one can barely survive on him/herself.

Technology is great because it is cheap, easily attainable and accessible, and bountiful. Technology is evil because it creates pollution, takes away manual labor which in effect takes away jobs. Technology is terrible, yes, but also great (yes, a quote from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone).

There is no "technology" without "techno"

by Susie Kim

So I was driving one day from I don't remember to I don't know where, and I was listening to the radios and one of my new (at-the-moment) favorite song came on: "Take Over Control" by Afrojack and Eva Simmons. I absolutely love it! Great beat, rhythm, and bass. I would dance in my seat every time the bass- break came on and get really into it! Then it hit me, I'm 25 years old who loves to dance and go to clubs to "exercise" and "practice" my grooves, and the middle- and high- school students are also probably loving this song and dancing to it. That made me feel slightly old and awkward at the same time because when they go to dances and listen to this song, and if they go to raves, etc, they will be used to it. I am just getting into House and Techno music while the students of today are growing up with it.

It must be fun to be a student of today's generation; they have endless informative resources (by phone, laptop, or iPad), digital cameras, great "techno" music, "free" file-sharing, and more! While I was growing up, we still had pagers, thick Nokia phones, some internet, and Oregon Trails (totally not hating! LOVE that game). It would be SO nice to live in their generation where many things are more accessible inexpensively. They have Facebook to keep up with their friends while in high school (with 400+ friends), while we (my generation) got Facebook while in college with fewer friends (600+ including high school and college friends). Technology is part of life for them as day and night is for us "older" generations. Man, life is unfair, I wish I was born in their generation; at least, we had "Baby-Sitter's Club", "Boxcar Children", and Donkey Kong while we were growing up :)

Anime Expo: Future

This weekend, I attended Anime Expo 7at the LA Convention Center and thoroughly enjoy it! There were MANY people (dressed in costumes, or cosplaying), lots of fun things (some for free), free Hi-Chew candy, and movies and anime shows. They even had panels and forums that people can attend to learn new things like origami, how to use markers and Photoshop, understanding the culture of anime and Japan, and so forth. It is fascinating how in the past three years that I've attended, I feel like there is more and more people coming to the convention. I know that at first they started with about 10,000 people coming, but more than 70,000 people attended the convention. People all over the world attends; I've talked to people who came from Japan, Germany, Korea, and the UK. The convention has been going on every year for 20 years around the weekend of Independence Day. To think that the animation industry is becoming so popular is exciting.

So it got me thinking, I think it is important as teachers to be aware of our students' interest and culture. In the past three years I've attended workshops that are so useful for me as an educator: a Photoshop workshop, how to use markers to color, creating Origami, how to get into the Animation industry, Korean Pop 101 forums, etc. If the teachers are aware of such informational conventions
(such as Anime Expo, Photography Expo, etc) and advice and/or suggest them to our students, then not only will we appear as being "aware" of the world and support our students' interest, but our such awareness can facilitate the want to learn. To rephrase this last thought: if I suggested to a student who was quiet but knew they liked manga, I can suggest AX to them, who in turn will be excited and want to research about it, (hypothetically) plan to attend it, look at the program guide and learn of available workshops that might interest them, and learn from those attended workshops. This is what I hope for of myself and my students, but the idea tickles my want to spread the greatness of anime and animation. I am partial to anime, since I've grown up with it.

Convention are soo cool!

Technology and "Our" generation, with "their" generation

by Susie Kim

So I was thinking about how we can incorporate technology into our classroom, not for instructional reason (though that is what I should be thinking about) but to catch-up to "our" generation. Granted that "our" generation is older than "their" generation, we still grew up with more technology and new gadgets than our own teachers. When I mean by "our" generation, I mean the individuals who were born around the 1980s-1990s who were born with some technology, and grew up with the computer. As we all know, the computer and the internet did not really bloom until the 1990s (when I was in middle school) and after the Y2K, the internet was a contagious commodity of our time. We grew up with MTV's TRL, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and Dragon BallZ, as well as the then "new" beepers and cellphones. When my dad had a beeper it was so cool and green! I wanted one! But now we are exposed to Blackberrys, iPads, Netbooks, etc... beepers are WAY out-of-date!

Going back to what I was originally saying, "our" generation-- the group of people who were born in the 1980s-1990s who grew up with the internet and modern technology-- are closely related to "their" generation-- our students who have and are accustomed to modern technology as part of their lives, we are at an advantage to connect with our students than the experienced, veteran teacher. We can connect to our students by sharing to each other what makes alike: growing up with a cell-phone (well, high school for me), having the internet as an informational resource, MySpace and Facebook pages, digital cameras, the mechanical pencil, Harry Potter and Twilight (at least for me). All these trends are popular then as they are now which changes perspectives in teaching. As we’ve learned in class, technology must be incorporated into every classroom and adapted to the growing technology as our students are adapting to them. Soon, we will be looking at our internet through 3-D glasses, or having touch-screen computer screens as interactive tools for our classrooms (when the prices go down, that is).

We must adapt to technology, rather than adapting technology adapting to the classroom. This will be a difficult endeavor to us educators and our pockets, but we have to engage our students’ interest in a more up-to-date way that our students are exposed to in their lives, to enhance their educational experiences.

My experience in technology

by Susie Kim

My first experience with technology while I was growing up was when I was in 2nd/ 3rd grade; I remember I played (and loved it) Oregon Trail because we get to shoot poor little animals and learn about the Oregon Trail (though I don't remember this). I also remember my teacher using the overhead projector to teach us English grammar and some other concepts. I remember it being dark in the room and we were all facing her as she wrote the states in pretty colored markers, or something like that. I also remember my teacher playing a book on tape, it was "Where the Red Fern Grows" if I remember correctly. I don't remember much else from my elementary school years.

When I was in middle school I remember my US History teacher prepared a Jeopardy game using PowerPoint for us and it was really interesting to play the game that way. I also took a class on typing when I was in 7th grade and I'm really thankful for that. Though my family owned a computer, I didn't really know how to type; and having that class helped me to type because we had a program that we were using. I loved to challenge myself by typing as fast as I could in the time that I had. I fully enjoyed taking this class, and being more prepared in using the computer than my friends who were in band or choir as their electives. This was the time when technology really started to change my life as the internet became well known and utilized in the schools (and at home).