Today was the last day the students would have on the Inside/Outside project. The teacher talked to me before the students got there and expressed her dissatisfaction with the work this class did the previous week. She said that she shared the blame because she should have given them bigger pieces of paper and been more explicit about making the schools look "real".
Her main complaint was that the projects looked messy. That I didn't disagree with, however I loved hearing all of the creativity and imagination they all used when putting their ideas onto the page. I never would have thought of the "TBRGS" or the teleport, bungee, roller coaster, gaming, and Star Wars school that was invisible to everyone except for the students. Nor would I have thought of the twelve story monster of a building that had a roller coaster helix surrounding it. And there was another school that was supposed to be "as big as Bruce Wayne's mansion".
So that meant that today was spent cleaning up projects by using rulers to redo lines and sharpie over as much as possible. The teacher said that only a few of these projects would get hung up and to not worry about the sharpie if they didn't have time and just to make some really nice pencil drawings.
Because it was the last day and the students had a lot of work to do today, their hands were very busy, however there were some students who seemed to be more intent on talking with their neighbors than working, which led to the teacher saying she will re-seat some students.
A main issue that I noticed today was that some students had trouble controlling a ruler, or that they wouldn't start with it straight to begin with and would get frustrated. It also seemed like a lot of students weren't able to put forth their best efforts because they were so rushed and were told that they couldn't finish it at home. That really made me sad because it seemed like the students really liked what they were doing and wanted to continue to work on it but weren't able to.
This will be my last Observation post because next class I start to teach a lesson to this group! So my next post about this group will be about what happened while teaching the lesson.