The May Mailbag: Teacher Appreciation, Difficult Co-Workers, and the End of the Year (Ep. 466)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for our teachers. The show is produced by The Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogats. Welcome to May, the first Tuesday of May, which means it is time for the Mailbag. Amanda Heyn is here. Amanda, how are you?

I am great, Tim. How are you?

I am doing great. Also, I feel like last month we forgot to introduce ourselves for all of the new listeners who are like “Mailbag Podcast, I should listen to this.” So would you like to tell everyone who you are please?

Yeah, sure. I’m Amanda Heyn. I’m the Director of Community Engagement at The Art of Education and I oversee the team that produces a lot of all of the wonderful things here. So the podcast and the magazine and the NOW conference and our Art of Ed community.

Oh, yes. We need to talk about the community.

Which is so fun.

In just a second.

Yes. I have some housekeeping, excuse me, related to the community that I–about in a minute, but an introduction. Who are you?

Tim:

Who am I? Really a huge philosophical question.

And tell us a fun fact about yourself.

All right. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite type of cookies.

Me too.

But my name-

Did we know this?

Yeah, I was going to say, we may have known that already, but my name is Tim Bogatz. I host this Art Ed Radio Podcast every week, every Tuesday, and I also run the Art Ed NOW conference twice per year coming up in August. It’s going to be a very exciting one. I’m looking forward to it. Former art teacher, a little bit of elementary experience, a lot of secondary experience, and then a lot of time here at The Art of Ed since then. So thank you all for tuning in. We are very excited to have you here. We have a lot of great questions this month, but before we get there, housekeeping. A lot of cool stuff happening in The Art of Ed community. Amanda, can you please give us a quick rundown?

I sure can. Also, I would like to go back to my introduction to say I also have street cred here. I also am a former art teacher. Okay.

Okay, fair.

All right. So if you haven’t joined The Art of Ed community, we are at I think 52 hundred members. I just looked this morning.

That’s amazing.

So many art teachers are joining us. It’s a free online space for art teachers. It’s like social media but only the good parts and only art teaching. So you should come join us. You can go to community.theartofeducation.edu to do that. And this is the perfect month to join if you haven’t joined yet and it’s the perfect month to come back. Excuse me. If you have been away for a little bit because we are celebrating teacher appreciation day and month and week and all of the things in May. So the most exciting thing is on May 8th, we are having an event and we are giving away $100 to five teachers and we are going to pick two of those winners from our live attendees to the event. So-

Nice.

It’s really easy to enter. You need to join the community, you need to complete the verification process, which just helps us keep the community a very safe place to be and says you are who you say you are. And then there’s a short five-minute questionnaire about The Art of Ed community and that is your ticket in. But like I said, it increases your chances to win by coming to our event called Art Club Live, because we’re going to draw two names from the audience. So also-

Also can I just say apart from this giveaway, Art Club’s just cool. It’s just fun to be there. So-

Exactly.

Yeah. There’s a lot of-

What I was-

… a lot of cool things happening. So sorry to steal your thunder.

No, that’s okay.

Go ahead.

But that’s exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say even money aside, you should come because Betsy Komarchuk, who is The Art of Education University’s enrollment specialist and student coach will be there and she’s going to be leading us through a printmaking activity. So you can create your own art and take some time for yourself to do that. You can choose to do the project Betsy is leading us through, or you can just come hang out and make your own art.

Nobody knows and we don’t care what you’re doing while you’re there. So we would love, love, love, love to have you. Also, this month, we are having daily giveaways this week. We are having giveaways of Art Ed NOW passes each week. And like I said, we’re also having big prizes at our events, which are May 8th and May 20th. And so if you’ve join the community and you’re looking for those along the left-hand side, there is an upcoming events space and you just hit that and you can RSVP right there.

Perfect. Perfect. All right, that all sounds very cool. So yeah, I think hopefully that’ll get more people there. Community is a great place to be. So if you’re listening to this, you’re not part of it or like Amanda said, if you’ve been gone for a while, come on back. It’s…

Come back.

A good place to be. All right. So Amanda, we also need to do story time, AKA garden talk, AKA whatever else you’ve been sharing or doing. I will just say I don’t have a lot of garden talk yet. I still haven’t even cleaned up from winter, so all my stems and leaves are still there. It’s time to clean that point or we’re getting soon, but I’m just hoping it’s been a beautiful bumblebee nursery for the past couple months, which I know you probably hate, but I just I need all the pollinators, so.

Bumblebee is my favorite pollinator because it looks like a flying pom pom and I do like that. I do like bumblebees. They’re not scary to me. They’re cute. I have a lot of garden updates, mostly my river of tulips is almost blooming.

I love it.

And I’m so pleased because right now I have every color of the rainbow in the front garden and I didn’t really-

That’s nice.

… know this was going to happen. Because I didn’t really know when things were coming up. But we have red tulips, we have yellow daffodils, we have orange tulips, we have green leaves, then we have these bluish purple flowers and then deep magenta tulips. And so it is giving rainbow and I’m so happy about it.

I love it. I love it.

I’m so happy about it. So-

Okay. I was going to suggest that you post in the community, but I feel like our garden has already taken over the podcast and I don’t know if we need gardens to take over the community also. But it might be-

One post.

… it might be worth posting a photo.

Yeah. You know what? I always say I’m going to post stuff and then I always forget, but I’m going to do it this time.

Hey, let’s do it.

I promise. So anyway, that’s exciting. I also need to give a shout-out to community member Jenny Rotundo because she DM’d me. First of all, she said we’re so funny, which is my favorite compliment to get. So thanks so much, Jenny. But she also gave me a tulip tip that I need to put spicy cayenne pepper, I think she said, on my tulip so the bunnies don’t eat them. And I just really-

On the ground around or directly on the tulip?

Well, no, not… You don’t sprinkle it on the tulips. You put it in the ground when you’re planting the tulips and then also on the ground around. Hold on, it is red pepper flakes. I’m pulling it up. I’m pulling it up for the people. Red pepper flakes on the bulb when planting them in the Fall and sprinkle it on the ground around the plants in the Spring.

I love this advice. Jenny, thank you.

Me too. So-

Also, Jenny, thanks for the compliment. Because honestly, I thought you and I were the only ones who found this funny, so I’m glad other people find us funny too.

Jenny said she laughs out loud, which is just like, oh my gosh, just made my day to hear that. So-

I appreciate that. Okay. I want to ask you one more thing before we get there. We had The Art of Ed Impact Week. Can you tell people what that’s about and tell people what you were doing for Impact Week?

Yeah, sure. So Impact Week is a week we all take generally in the Spring to just give back and-

Everybody in The Art of Education organization. Everyone-

Yes, everybody. Everybody at AOE goes out and does a service day with an art teacher. And it’s just so heartwarming and fun and it was extra fun for me because I got to dust off my teaching skills.

Yes.

And teach a couple of classes. I also got to organize a closet and like, oh my gosh, organizing a closet is my favorite activity. And in fact the teacher was like, “I really love how clean this closet is. If you want to come back and do more closet stuff…” And I was like, “I’ll see what I can do.” It was great. I took glaze inventory.

Oh.

Oh my gosh. And I was like, “Here are all the glazes you have. Here are the glazes you need.” And it was spectacular. So I got to organize and switch out, flex my bulletin board skills, switch out some displays and it was just great. It was great to be able to help that teacher and give her a break and it was good. Have you done yours yet?

Yeah.

Yes, you did.

So well, yes and no. I’m halfway there. So the district art show where I used to teach, they have an art show at the end of April and it always coincides with Impact Week, which is very convenient for me. So anyway, I went and judged the show, which is very enjoyable. I love doing that every year. And then I’m going to follow up with some workshops and some teaching along with it. So that will be coming soon. So-

Nice.

… looking forward to doing that. But yeah, just I love seeing everything that kids are creating and it’s very cool. Even though, like I said, I’m here at The Art of Ed all the time, it’s really good to get back into classrooms, get back and see what’s being created, what kids are doing. And it is fulfilling, I guess, for lack of a better word. And it’s something I miss for sure. So it’s good to get back in there.

Yeah, for sure. Also, one of the kids, I got told that I had cool nails and cool jeans and that’s always reassuring as I am getting older to know I can still hang. That was also personally fulfilling to me.

Yeah. Validation comes in many forms.

It does.

Cool. All right, I think it’s time for us to get to our many, many questions. Amanda, would you like to start us off?

Yes, let’s go ahead and open up the Mailbag.

We had a ton of questions come in via email. Also, a ton of questions come in via Instagram. So a lot there. And there are so many questions about early finishers, about last days of school, about one day lessons for… Choose your grade level, for anybody. People want to know a lot. So Amanda, what are our best tried-and-true ideas for May and June?

How many podcast episodes do you have? Just kidding. I’ll try to make this brief, but there are so many things you can do at the end of the year. So okay. One thing I like to do is redo something you did at the beginning of the year with or without a twist and see how your students have grown. So whether that’s a self-portrait or a landscape or whatever it is, observational drawing, it can be really fun to compare and contrast where your students started and where they’re at right now.

Okay. Something else that is maybe controversial or just a non-traditional thing is do something really messy. I know a lot of us like to wind down and kind of pack things up and whatever, but sometimes your students need really engaging things like printmaking, like weaving, like multimedia work because you are now competing with warm weather, you’re competing with dreams of recess. You’re competing with other classes who are outside.

All the distractions. yeah.

Yeah. Lots of distractions.

Can I just interrupt really quickly? I used to do this with my high schoolers and I would just be like, “Hey, trade-off. I’m going to give you a very cool project, but in return we have to do some serious deep cleaning.” And so we would just mess up the room with painting or printmaking or clay or whatever. And then once we were done with that, we really got down to cleaning right after that.

Oh.

And so it was a pretty good trade-off. It worked well for everyone.

I love that. I also think obviously this is the perfect time to go outside. I think on a recent episode we did a deep dive on outside ideas.

Yes, I will find that and link to that. And we have a lot of resources on going outside. If people are looking to do that, we’ll find those for you.

But literally just grab a bucket of chalk. Hey, doesn’t-

Like that-

… have to be. That’s enough.

That can be your lesson plan for the day.

Yeah. If you are looking for one-day lessons, you can search the magazine. Also, FLEX members, there are collections for K two, three, five middle school and high school that are all one-day lesson collections.

Yes.

So you can search FLEX there. If you’ve been here before, I have to say it, you could always do the perfect one-day lesson, which is our maybe highest-watched YouTube video of all time. If you’d like to see what I looked like in 1957, you can go watch that. Fun fact, this is the lesson I did.

Of course it is.

Of course it of it is. And the kids loved it. It was perfect. It was the perfect one-day lesson. It’s great. Anyway, it’s this oil-pastel-tie-dye thing. And then I think some other ideas aside from projects are student feedback. So I loved asking my students at the end of the year, we would take a day and just have them do a survey. What did they enjoy, what would they suggest changing? Kids are pretty insightful and you’re going to get some not great answers, but you might get some good feedback there.

And then like you were talking about, have the kids help you shut the art room down. This is part of being an artist is caring for materials, understanding what it takes to maintain a studio space. So if you want, there is a resource we have called “40 End of the Year Cleanup Jobs for Your Students” that we can hopefully put in the show notes. But three quick ideas that you can literally pull out anytime or have kids test and sort markers, have them sort through the scrap bin for usable scraps versus garbage and scrub the sink area. I feel like those are things that always need to be done. Sharpen pencils for next year. Can pull out some pretty quick things that will be helpful to you.

Yeah. And I was just going to say I don’t have much to add to that encyclopedia of ideas, so thank you Amanda. But there are going to be times where half your class wants to work and half doesn’t, and it’s okay to let half the class work and the other half do some cleaning jobs.

Yeah.

That can be a little chaotic. It may not work for your organization that you have or your classroom management that you’re used to, but I would encourage people to try it out and just kind of meet kids where they are, give them what they need and it can be a win-win for everybody there. Okay. Our next question is from G underscore Sean underscore on Instagram, and I’m not even sure if this qualifies as a question. Yeah, I think it does. They just said, “I’m retiring, now what?” Which I love, which is amazing. So Amanda, now neither of us have ever retired, but-

But we’ve never retired. However, I think I have some advice. First of all-

I was just going to say I daydream about it quite often.

Yeah.

So I think I know what I would like to do, but what-

Okay, so.

What would you say?

Well, first of all, that reminded me when my husband and I first got married and we got married really young. I was 22, we were both 22. We got married and three weeks later he is like, “I think I’m ready to be a retired grandpa.” I was like, “Well, we have a lot of things to do before…”

A little ways to go.

But-

I guess, we would all be retired grandpas if we could.

Yeah, retirement sounds amazing. So, okay. I also have a funny story about my aunt. She retired a few years ago and she was like, “Everyone keeps asking me, what are you going to do? What are you going to do now that you retired?” And she was like, “What do you mean what am I going to do? I just worked for 40 years. I am doing nothing. I’m sleeping in, I’m reading books. I’m not doing anything.”

That is the way to go.

I just really loved that answer. So I think one thing you could do is to think about do you want to stay connected to teaching in any way? No one says you have to, right? But are you envisioning yourself subbing or volunteering or teaching community classes or mentoring? Come join us in The Art of Ed community and give people advice if you want to.

But also take a minute, what are things that you can do now that you couldn’t do before? Teachers have really limited PTO days during the school year and can’t travel during certain times of the year and go to the bathroom whenever you want as many times as you want. I don’t know. What do you want to do?

All of these dreams, yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay, so I actually, I loved this question and so I spent some time reaching out to some retired friends that I know. Debi West was one of them, which a lot of people know Debbie, so I wanted to give her a shout-out.

Is Debi really retired?

That’s true. She just keeps working. And so I asked her like, “Hey, what do you do?” And she has this list of 15 things that she does now. And yeah, I’m not sure she is actually really retired, but from yeah, about a half dozen of my retired friends, very consistent if you want to stay involved, volunteering, subbing. You can do summer art camps. You can just make your own art. You can do visual journaling. And a lot of people suggested connecting with and mentoring younger teachers.

So I think that’s yeah, a very good option if you do want to stay connected. If you don’t want to stay connected, that’s okay too. You’ve done decades in the classroom most likely, and so if you want to step away from all of that, you definitely can. And a lot of suggestions about finding other creative endeavors, whether that’s gardening or cooking or scrap booking or quilting or just whatever hobby you may want to do. Just find some kind of a creative outlet that can be worthwhile.

And a few people said it’s okay to do nothing, which I think is good advice. It goes back to exactly what you said, Amanda, if you want to just sit around and do nothing, you’ve earned that. You can do nothing for as long as you want. And so I definitely appreciate anybody who can kind of step back and do that as well. So okay, next question is from I believe Hcfring on Instagram. This is says, “What should I start prepping for next year? Asking for a first year teacher.” This is good. We went from retirement to-

Yes.

… just starting out our career. So Amanda, advice for a first year teacher on what they should start prepping for next year?

Is this me 15 years ago? I love this question. Okay, so I think don’t go nuts. Okay? Right? I love that you’re thinking about this. Also, be gentle with yourself. You probably, you just completed a marathon really, right? As a first year teacher. However, if you do want to get on top of things, these are things that I would suggest. One, get your supplies in order. Right? So go through all of the markers, which ones are dead, sharpen all the pencils, get everything sorted that got messed up throughout the year. You will be starting from a really good place in the fall.

Also, declutter. Right? So are there things that you kept around that you’ve come to realize you’re never actually going to use? This is a great time to throw those away or give them to another teacher or whatever. Get rid of anything just basically that you know you’re not going to use. And then I… this is maybe insane. I don’t know. I like to leave this school year with quarter one loosely planned, and then the first project for each grade level actually decided and fully prepped. So I would cut the paper. Is this crazy? You’re giving me a look.

This is insane. Okay. I will say quarter one, loosely planned, great advice. Having the first project planned and prepped is way over the top, in my opinion.

I don’t know. Please email us if you think that’s not crazy.

Yes, please chime in. We would love to know where everybody is. But yeah, I don’t know. I would say my advice is very similar to yours, Amanda. I like the idea of planning ahead a little bit. Trying to just have an idea of what you want to start the year with next year when you come in. That’s a good idea. If you want to cut paper and sharpen pencils and put them into neat little piles, go for it. That’s fantastic. I also like the idea of getting rid of stuff. Give yourself permission to toss things. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff around your room where you said, “Oh, I better keep that just in case of this,” or “I better hang onto that in case we need it for this.”

And then you get through the year and you realize you didn’t need it. It’s okay to get rid of those things. Okay? And if you can make your room a little less cluttered, a little… I don’t know, a little more spacious, a little bit cleaner, that’s going to be good for you, that’s going to be good for your students. And then I don’t know where you are in your school year. Some people have two weeks left, some people have four, some people have six weeks left. I don’t know. But this is a good opportunity to try different setups or try some different systems before the end of the year.

Whether that’s just how your tables are arranged or how you pass out paint or how kids access drawing materials, whatever. If there’s something that you feel like is not working or something you feel like could be better, this is a great chance to try it differently. Try a different setup, try a different pass out system, try a different cleaning routine, whatever the case may be. And that’ll give you an idea of, “Hey, this would work better.” Or “No, we should stick with the original” or “We should make these tweaks.”

But there’s a good opportunity there to kind of think about your routines, your plans, your systems, your arrangements and all of that. Things you may want to try differently next year. Now is a good opportunity to give those a test run before the end of the school year. So that was about the only other thing that I could think about. But I think that that’s good advice, to just kind of clean what you can, organize what you can, get rid of what you can, and then have a general idea of how you want to start the year. And then I think you’ll be set up. And if you can give yourself some time to rest and relax over the summer, I think that’s going to be honestly even more valuable than getting everything prepped for next year.

Agree. Definitely take the summer to recoup.

Yeah. Although I will say my wife, history teacher, she’s a type A personality and she cannot rest and relax until next year is prepped.

See.

So-

This is what I’m talking about.

And so if you need to do all that stuff first, go ahead and do that first, but do arrange things so you do have some time to decompress after this first year. So, okay. Now this question, Amanda, is, I don’t know, not nearly as fun as the other ones we’ve seen, but this person wanted to stay anonymous. But the question is, “Do you have any advice on how to deal with a difficult coworker? We have different teaching styles, different classroom management philosophies and different personalities.”

And then questions that go along with that. “Do you deal with issues head on as they come up? Do you keep your head down and avoid the situation? And then have you ever had to do peer mediation with an admin or principal or do you try to handle situations within your department? And finally, how do you appropriately discuss situations with a coworker that tends to lash out when things do not go their way?” So a lot there. What are you thinking? Which of those do you want to answer, Amanda?

Okay, my eyes are really big. Like, oh my gosh. It’s not a fun question, but it’s a very-

There’s obviously a lot going on here.

Yeah, it’s a very relatable question and it’s a very good question for the Mailbag. Okay. As I was reading this question, it just made me think you are co-parenting with this person. Right? Essentially, you have to be in a relationship with this person even though you don’t want to. You have to find solutions and work things out with this person even though you don’t want to do that. And so I would say that you should approach this from a very solutions oriented lens. So I would first vent to a friend. I think you need-

I mean, let’s be honest, that’s exactly the first thing that everybody’s going to do.

Probably not somebody in your school. I think that can get a little tricky. Right?

Yes.

Probably other people are having difficulty with this person. But I would vent to a friend that is outside of the situation and have the people you can go to to complain about things that are annoying you. I would say if it’s really egregious behavior, I would also be sure you are documenting it. Right? Regularly and just to protect yourself that way. I would control what you can control, right? What can you control within your own classroom that this person does not affect. But then for the things that you are doing together or sharing of spaces or whatever, I would try to work it out with this person first. So it said, “Do you deal with things head on? Do you keep your head down and avoid the situation?”

I would say it depends. If it’s something that you can just let them live their lives, even if you don’t agree with their teaching philosophy, yes, just let them live their lives. It’s not your job to critique their teaching style or try to do anything about it. That’s the administration’s job. Now, if they’re putting kids in danger or being abusive, yes, that does become your job and then you need to escalate it to admin immediately. But if you just don’t like how they’re doing things in their classroom, man, that is not your circus, not your monkeys. That’s not for you. Okay. So again, I think if there are things you have to collaborate on, I would just be overly kind. I would practice detachment. I would practice the Grey Rock method. Do you know the Grey Rock method?

I am familiar, but yes, please explain.

The Grey Rock method or sometimes it’s called umbrella. It’s just basically you become the least interesting, least reactive person on the planet and you just are incredibly calm in whatever they say. You just do not react. You do not give them any bait. You just exist as a little pebble.

Imagine yourself as a Grey Rock, and that is-

Right.

… your personality now.

That is your personality now. And so you interact where you have to and you don’t where you don’t. And that can be really helpful in helping keep yourself regulated because also you don’t want this person affecting your life on a day-to-day basis. The other thing is think about ways to control the situation without interacting. So if there is a coworker who’s constantly coming into your room to complain, maybe just shut the door. You know what I mean? Maybe go eat lunch somewhere else where they can’t find you. There are ways to do that. So I don’t know, that was a lot of ideas kind of jumbled together. Hopefully some of that was helpful. Tim, do you have thoughts here?

Yeah. I really like everything that you said. I tried to summarize my thoughts in just a short snippet I guess, a short phrase. And what it was for me is it comes down to what annoys you versus what affects you. And the question is asking about when do you deal with things? How do you deal with things? And if it’s just something that annoys you, you don’t deal with them.

Right.

Like the person has dumb shoes on, they’re annoying in meetings, they have kind of an obnoxious classroom management, the art’s not that good and it’s disorganized. Those are all annoying things, those don’t affect you. Those don’t affect you as a teacher. They don’t affect your classroom. They don’t affect your students. So I would not worry about that. But I’m lucky to not ever have had this situation. I’ve liked everyone that I’ve shared rooms with and taught with, so that’s been very good. But I’ve also had teachers that would come in and just interrupt my class to pull students out or come talk to students and get them riled up and no, this is an issue. You’re really ruining my classroom management right now. And so that’s when you deal with things.

And so that’s when I would deal with things head on, deal with things as they come up. And so I just think about if you can separate those. And then when things affect you, I would ask that person out, talk to that person directly about it. And if the solution is not coming, if you can’t decide on a resolution, then yeah, maybe you do need to do the peer mediation with an admin or go talk to your principal about that. But I would say don’t do that for the little things. Things that annoy you, you just have to let those go. The things that are directly affecting you or your classroom, then yeah, those need to be resolved, whether it is with this teacher that is the difficult coworker, or if you need to escalate it to a little bit higher level, like when it is affecting your teaching, that’s when you know.

And that’s when it’s helpful, excuse me, to have that documentation.

Yeah.

And again, come with a solutions-oriented perspective. Like, “These are the things I’ve tried. Here’s what’s still not working.” Or “I think we could figure this out, X, Y, Z.” Even if it doesn’t end up being the solution that is ultimately decided upon, that lens will show you as a problem instead of someone who’s just complaining, so.

Yes, very well said. That’s good advice.

But good luck. That’s a hard situation.

I was just going to say.

And…

Best of luck.

Yeah.

Yeah. You never know exactly how that’s going to go. No.

Yeah.

Okay, Amanda, again, we had just an overflow of questions, so I wanted to do a speed round here to close this out.

Okay.

And I also realize that I have not let you read anything. So maybe we can switch back and forth with speed round here.

Sure.

So we have a few questions. We’ll give each person a quick answer and then hopefully think of a specific Art of Ed resource that can help and can learn more since we are giving such short answers here. So from Alicia Mar one, they’re looking for art show tips for a first timer working solo.

Okay, keep it simple. You’re doing one artwork per kid, you’re not doing anything extra. You’re building on it from year to year and you are going to advertise it so people come. Your school newsletter, social media, flyers directly in the hands of kids as they walk out of the art room. The resource is “Art Show Secrets” on YouTube.

Yes.

Has everything you need to know.

Yes. Okay. That was a great speed round by the way. Good.

Thanks so much. Okay.

Okay.

Here’s yours. Veridomango says is looking for paint distribution for high schoolers that fosters independence and minimizes waste.

Oh, that’s good. Okay. So minimizing waste is going to be just constantly telling them over and over, “Don’t take too much paint.” So I always said size of a dime. If we see size of a dime, then you get praised. If you see more than that, you get yelled at. I love old magazines for that because you can stay organized them. You can stack them. You just put the paint on the top of the magazine when you’re done, you tear that page off, throw it in the trash. Magazine’s sitting there for the next class to get their dime size of paint out.

I think we talked about this at length in the Ask the Experts Podcast, Painting Edition with Lena Rodriguez. I also know if the magazine idea doesn’t work for you, we have an article about 13 different types of palettes that can be used in the art room. So I think Josh Chrosniak wrote that perhaps. So we’ll link to that. And then you have all sorts of options for palettes that you may want to take a look at. Okay. Question from the HS, I assume high school, Art Teacher, “Balance between keeping learners engaged, but also cleaning and packing the room.” Talked about this a little bit earlier, but Amanda summarize in.

Yeah. I think to recap-

17 seconds or less.

17 seconds? Okay. It’s both and. You think about each class and what they need. Many classes need to keep making arts, some classes or some students can handle other jobs. Also, you could try out stations, so you can have different groups doing different things and you can start early with packing up and bring out projects that are easier to set up and clean up at the very, very end of the year. Okay. Your resource is “3 Cool Projects to Use Up Scraps at the End of the Year.” It’s an article.

Oh, I forgot about that article. That’s a good one.

You should read it.

Yeah. Okay. Sounds good.

Okay. Next and last is Errow. Oh my gosh, ErrowLeahFCreative on Instagram.

ArrowLeafCreative.

Errow. Okay. ErrowLeahFCreative. Well, maybe her name is LeahF. I think you’re right. Okay.

It could be. Could be.

ErrowLeahFCreative is looking for an idea for a clay unit without a kiln.

Oh, that’s good. There are lots of options. My default with clay is always food. Kids love doing food sculptures. You can make tacos, you can make cheeseburgers, you can make sushi, you can make candy, you can make desserts. So many different ideas. Always love going to food. Whether you have polymer clay, air dry clay, model magic, whatever the case may be, that always works really well to just default to the food sculpture. So that would be my recommendation.

We have a great article by the one and only Amanda Heyn. It’s called “An In-Depth Look at Air Dry Clay.” I remember that one. And I believe there is a Cassie Stephens Podcast when she was hosting Everyday Art Room, all about teaching clay without a kiln. So two options there, but there are good. A lot of good resources there. So, okay, I think that brings our speed round to an end. I think that brings our podcast to an end. So Amanda, thank you so much for coming on to chat with me again. Anything else you want to close with?

No, just like you’re almost there, everybody, you can do it. We’re very close.

You might have two weeks or four weeks or six weeks left, but the end is sight. You can get there.

Yes.

We can do it.

Yes. We’ll see you next month.

Thank you to Amanda for the conversation, for the advice, for the expertise. We appreciate all of that. And of course we’ll put together all of the show notes, all of the things that we talked about, especially during the speed round. So if you want to dive a little bit deeper into any of those ideas, check out more resources, we’ll have those all for you in the show notes. All right. We will go ahead and call that good here.

We always have such long conversations. I feel like we need to rush things at the end, but we will go ahead and wrap it up. And we will talk to Amanda again at the beginning of June for the next Mailbag. Thanks for joining us. Art Ed Radio is produced by The Art of Education with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. Please be sure to subscribe so we can join you again. If you love the show, we would love to have you leave a review.

And Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen, the five star ratings are always appreciated. And if you want to share the show with a friend, we would love that as well. And we are always taking questions for the next Mailbag. We had a ton today and we loved it. So if you have any questions about art teaching, about what you should do over the summer or anything else that you want to hear us talk about, we would love to hear from you. You can email me timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu, or send a message to podcasts@theartofeducation.edu. We are looking forward to reading your questions and hopefully answering them in the next Mailbag.