As of yesterday I officially finished my first prac! Amazingly I passed. It was definitely a learning experience. There is so much that you find out about yourself when you're thrown into a situation where you're forced to teach groups of teenagers, and all the while you have people judging you on your level of skills and knowledge.
Being a shy person, just speaking to large groups of people on a daily basis was a big step forward for me! So really I don't mind if my delivery got picked on by my mentor or supervisor, or if they tell me I need to work on particular things. I've started to grow. I'll keep on growing. I now have some idea as to what is required for me to be the best I can be :) A little bit of scrutiny can be a good thing in this respect.
Not only did I learn so much about my planning, presence and delivery, I also learnt how much knowledge is out there that I still need to get my little hands on! Books, books and more books. Resources upon resources. Photocopy upon photocopy. I took so many photocopies of resources away with me, I'm going to struggle to go through them. It's incredible. I was so excited to find these little gems and be allowed to take whatever I pleased.
This first teaching prac was jam packed full of inspiration. The work that upperschool students were creating was amazing. I got so many ideas for my own practices from them (mostly because I never studied art in upperschool myself, so have only learnt some mere basics at uni), as well as books I was shown, and first-hand crash-courses - such as the one provided by Trish the technician. She showed me some basics in using watercolours, which was lovely of her. She is an incredible watercolourist / botanical artist and I hope she illustrates magical children books one day!
You know what's terrible... I'd never seen the feathering technique using coloured pencils before a couple of weeks ago at the Year 12 exhibition. So I gave it a try and gave some poor girl a crappy nose and a mong eye, haha.
Today I also went ahead and bought myself some "end of prac" presents
They were expensive, but will be worth it - and I'm so excited about owning them! I had been shown 'The New Acrylics' by the technician / seen it on the bookshelf in the Art Dept. at the school, and it's just packed full of some great techniques and information. So this version will be very useful. As will the 'Complete Painting and Drawing Handbook' for explicitly teaching concepts that I just automatically might go and do in an artwork without thinking about. Some great ideas in it!
So yay. Now I have a week "break" - which is really just me working on boring assignments that are due one on top of the other for the rest of the term, so yay for me and my wonderous uni life. Before I know it, Summer will be around and I'll be turning 21!
Speaking of Summer... Do watch '500 Days of Summer'. Funniest, most devastating movie, ever.
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