The November Mailbag: Netflix, Broken Supplies, and How We Grade Late Work (Ep. 442)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by the Art of Education University, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz. All right. Welcome to November. Welcome everyone to the November Mailbag. It is the first episode of the month, so we are here to answer all of your questions. Amanda Heyn is back this month joining me. Amanda, how are you?

I’m so good. I really missed last month, but thanks to Janet for filling in. My mom also missed me being on the podcast, although she really enjoyed listening to Janet too.

That’s good. Your mom is a loyal listener. Wait, does she listen to other episodes or does she just listen when you show up?

No, just mine.

Okay. I assumed as much. I don’t know why she would listen to me if she’s not an art teacher, but we appreciate her listening.

We do.

Yeah. Shout out. I guess we should say, when this episode airs, it is election day. So, I want to tell everybody, please go vote. I don’t care how you vote, but please go vote. My wife is a social studies teacher and it’s very important for her that everyone is civically engaged. So, message from her to everyone, please go vote. Amanda, did you vote already?

Yeah, of course. I voted early as coincides with my personality. I brought my kids. I think it’s really cool for your kids to go with if you have kiddos, your own personal children. Obviously, don’t bring students to the polls, and they had really cute future voter stickers-

Oh, nice.

… at my polling place. So, the kids really liked it.

That’s good.

It feels good to be, like you said, civically engaged. Did you vote?

Yeah, I voted by mail. Nebraska has been doing that for a while, and so my wife and I both vote by mail early. So, we can get our ballots and just research each issue that we don’t know enough about. Because when you go to the polls, if you don’t remember exactly how you’re supposed to vote, it’s tough to look things up. You feel like you’re taking too long and it’s very stressful for me.

Yes, I like giving myself a mental cheat sheet. In Wisconsin, they have a thing where you can… I don’t know if Nebraska, I don’t know if this is everywhere, but it’s like you can look up what’s on your ballot. You put in your address. It’ll show you your ballot ahead of time.

Yeah, you can do your prep work. But yeah, I enjoy just doing it at my kitchen table. So, I always vote by mail, and like I said, you can track your ballot, make sure it’s arrived, make sure it’s counted. Yeah, I appreciate all of that, so I was happy to do that. Beyond elections, we’ve moved past Halloween. It’s November. What else is going on for you?

I have a fall garden update.

Everyone was so ready to be done with gardens. Are we still talking about gardens in November?

Nobody can see this, but I brought all the plants in my new fall garden, all the things.

Oh, my gosh.

Maybe they can do an ASMR. Can you hear this?

Have you flipped through the tags? Yeah.

Yeah, little tags.

Sounds terrible. But tell us about that.

I hired my friend to redo a garden because turns out if you plant a tree over a garden, then your garden turns from a sun garden into a shade garden over the years. So, we had this garden that was planted before we moved in. This is getting really long. Anyway, there’s a lot of different Hostas in there because I was like, “Please give me a plant I don’t need to do anything to and it will just grow.” I just really like the names. There’s some different green tones or hues I guess we would say. My favorite one is called guacamole. It has darker green around the edges and then an avocado.

Okay. Okay. I like it.

I also really like Jack Frost because it’s shiny. The leaves almost look fuzzy or they have a sheen and I’m really into it.

So you have a very specific aesthetic for this new garden.

Oh, she made me a ranking system, because I was like, “Look, I don’t know anything about how to take care of plants, but I do know what I like and what I don’t like.” I’m picky aesthetically. So, she made essentially a Google Quiz for me and I had to rank all of the pictures of all of the plants and it was very fun. Then the last step is we’re going to do a river of tulips in the middle of this garden. I’m so excited.

I like this. So, are we expecting in the spring it’s going to be looking great like you plant now and it’s coming in for the spring?

That’s the hope. I have been watering it on the schedule she told me to. I’m being very diligent.

I was going to say, this all sounds very elaborate.

No, but it’s not. I was like, push the easy button. I can’t be pruning things.

Yeah, yeah, I understand.

So anyway, you’re welcome to everybody who came for garden talk, and I’m sorry to all the people who do not.

All right. Can I share one quick story? Because this was a fun one for me. I was at the grocery store last week and just go up the aisle and I just hear off the side, I hear this voice go, “Art, art, art!” I was like, “What?” I look over and it is a former student of mine. She had just a lot of intellectual and developmental disabilities, but she remembered me from 2008, 2009. She remembered me as her art teacher. So, I was like, “Katie!” So I went over and talked to her and she loves checking out people’s thumbnails. So, every day when she came into art, she would have to inspect my thumbnail.

So, I went over and just gave her my thumb and she looked at it and her mom got the biggest smile on her face that I had remembered that. So, she checked out. So, I talked to Katie for a while, talked to mom for a while, but really just warmed my heart that this kid remembered me from… She’s got to be in her 30s now. Yeah, she remembered and shouted art at me when she saw me. So, I love that.

I would love if people shouted art at me and remembered me like that.

Absolutely. So, that was a feel good moment for me. So, I appreciated that. That was very cool.

That’s awesome.

I guess the other thing that we should talk about before we open up the mailbag are the show notes that we always talk about because you all should see the look on Amanda’s face right now.

Here’s the thing.

Can you tell us why we need to talk about show notes?

Yeah, because I realized I don’t know what the show notes are. Every time we do a mailbag, I personally say at least three times we’ll put it in the show notes and then I realized I don’t know where to find the show notes. Are the show notes on our website? Do you click a button? Are the show notes in the podcast player? This is extra embarrassing because I like to consider myself like a podcast connoisseur.

You are a podcast listener. You definitely are.

So I just thought, “Well, maybe A, either everyone thinks I’m an idiot, which is fine, or B, maybe other people don’t know where the show notes are. Maybe I could just be a little vulnerable and maybe you could just tell me where the show notes are and maybe that would just help other people find the resources.”

Yeah, I’m going to go with B and we appreciate your vulnerability. You can find the show notes on our website if you ever go and listen via the website. If you open your podcasts app, when Art Ed Radio pops up, it’ll come up with a list of episodes underneath there. You’ll probably see the logo and then you’ll see the list of episodes. When you click on the episode, it’ll give you the description. It’s one paragraph long, talking about what is there, what the episode is about. Then below that are all of the show notes, all of the resources, all of the links. So, you may have to scroll just a bit, but it’ll say resources and links. Then for these episodes, we have six or eight or 10 resources and links usually. You can find everything right there in the app.

Wow, that’s so amazing. What a time we live in. Thank you for explaining that.

What a time to be alive. All right. Then can I add one more thing? We should probably do this before we’re 9 or 10 minutes into the episode, but I have been made aware that we have a lot of new listeners to these podcast episodes or the mailbag episodes, a lot of new listeners to the podcast. So, I got a couple messages saying, “These episodes are great, who are you?” So I thought we should introduce ourselves.

So, I am Tim Bogatz. I’ve hosted this podcast for eight years now, something like that, maybe nine years, 450 episodes worth. Yeah, I was an elementary teacher, art teacher for a couple of years. I was a secondary art teacher for a lot of years. Then I’ve been working full-time for the Art of Ed for the past eight years. So, yeah, this is what we do. We’re coming at you every week with podcast episodes. So, Amanda, can you give all of our new listeners a quick introduction?

Yes. I am the director of community engagement at AOEU. I have been also working here for an eternity. I have done a lot of different roles here. I wrote for the magazine. I edited it. I oversaw PRO Learning, our PD platform. I’m heavily involved in the NOW Conference and now our new community platform. So, that’s really exciting. We hope you all join us over there. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

I was just going to say, I will link in the show notes to the community.

Yeah, how to do that. I also am a former art teacher. I taught elementary art and loved it. What else? I love confetti. I’m a Scorpio. What else do you want to add? That’s it for now.

You love gardens. I think that’s good. So, anyway, welcome to all of our new listeners. It’s great to meet you. I hope you enjoy these episodes and we have a lot of emails and questions to get to. So, Amanda, can you officially get us started?

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

All right. Our first question comes from Tracy. Tracy says, “I’m on bed rest for the next two months and I need as many suggestions as possible. I would love to know your favorite art-related movies or shows on Netflix or any other platforms so I can add them to my list. What art shows have you enjoyed watching?” All right. Amanda, I feel like this question could not be any more in your wheelhouse, so I would love for you to answer this first.

Yeah, how much time do you have? I do want to answer it first. First of all, we’re very sorry to hear that you’re on bed rest. I can’t imagine any situation where that’s a good thing. So, we are sending you all the positive vibes. I do have recommendations broken down by platform for you. I love TV. Okay, so my first recs come from Netflix if you’re Netflix user. The first is the Abstract: The Art of Design series. It follows a bunch of different designers. There’s an episode on Olafur Eliasson who does these incredible light installations. I really love him. That episode is called The Design of Art. So, that’s good. The whole series is good, but if you’re looking like super, super art, like fine art specific, I would suggest that as a place to start.

Okay, the next one I’m going to butcher, but I believe it’s Vjeran Tomic: The Spider-Man of Paris. If you just look up the Spider-Man of Paris, you should get to it. But this interviews an art thief about a robbery he carried out at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. So, he legitimately did an art heist and he is being interviewed for this documentary. The reason he’s called the Spider-Man of Paris is because he literally scales buildings. So, there’s also all of this first person footage of GoPro of him scaling the buildings and doing parkour, essentially the rooftops. It also interviews some of the individuals he stole from. So, it mainly tracks this one heist he did, but he also was a cat burglar, going into people’s apartments and taking art off their walls while they were home. It’s so fascinating.

Okay. Did he GoPro his crimes? Did he record his crimes?

I don’t think so. I think it’s after the fact that this is adding to the ambiance of the documentary.

I got you.

So it’s not like first person art crime.

Which I would totally watch by the way. But no, this whole thing sounds fascinating. I like it.

It keeps you on the edge of your seat because is he going to fall off the roof? But obviously, spoiler alert, he does not. Okay. Then if you haven’t watched the Bob Ross documentary, it’s called Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed.

Right? It starts off so happy. You bring it up on the Netflix queue and you’re like, “Bob Ross”. The first word you see is happy and then all of a sudden betrayal and greed.

Yeah. If you love Bob Ross, you should watch it. It’s really interesting about how his estate has unfolded over the years. I’ll just say that.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Should I just keep going?

Yes, I would love to know what else you got.

All right. Amazon Prime, you can sometimes get to PBS through this. I think this also might just straight up be on YouTube, but there is an old documentary called Between the Folds, which is about origami, which I know you’re saying that sounds so boring, but I promise it’s so good. It’s about the intersection of origami and other disciplines. So, they talk about the future of medicine and origami and there is a fine artist who does more sculptural work and it’s just my own children are obsessed with origami. We’ve been to the National Origami Convention in New York City.

So, this is a required viewing in our home, but it’s a really fun watch and it’s just under an hour, I think. So, it’s an easy one. Then on Hulu, I have a couple of education-related shows, so these are not art shows, but if you’re not watching Abbott Elementary, what are you doing?

Great, great.

Great. Just about an elementary school, in the style of The Office with the confessionals and stuff, really fun. The other one I hesitate recommending because it is like take the M warning seriously. Okay, do not watch this with kids around. The M warning is there for multiple reasons, but it is called The English Teacher. Again, I just think it’s a very realistic take on the state of education in general. I find myself laughing out loud at a lot of it. But again, if you don’t like swearing, if you don’t like other mature themes, not for you.

Okay. Is this a funny show though? I don’t know anything about it. Okay.

Funny show.

You made it sound like it was filled with murder and sex. It’s a little bit of murder.

There’s no murder. There’s a lot going on. So, there’s a lot going on, but I am enjoying it.

Okay, sounds good. All right, thank you. I will run through mine really quickly. Mine are almost all from Netflix. This is a robbery about the Gardner Museum heist. I believe there are four episodes, a great documentary there. Then that can probably send you down a whole different rabbit hole of books and podcasts about the Gardner Museum heist. Fascinating. I think I’ve consumed it all. It’s very good. There is also a documentary about art forgery called Made You Look.

That one’s good.

Yeah, it caused quite the stir a couple years ago when it came out. I think we did an emergency podcast all about it. So, yeah, that’s a very good one if you have not seen that. There’s a new one I have not watched yet, but a couple friends have recommended it to me called The Andy Warhol Diaries. So, I don’t know anything about it, but I’ve heard it’s good, so it might be worth checking out. I also love Blown Away. I don’t know how to describe a competition show about glassblowing and I don’t know how many seasons they have now, but there are multiple seasons. So, if you’re down for a binge-watch, then you can definitely do that. Also, if I can plug another podcast, back after season one, I interviewed Momo Schafer, one of the contestants from Blown Away.

That was a super fun interview. You can check that out too if you’re looking for extras. Then there’s a documentary about Cai Guo-Qiang called Sky Ladder, and I actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about sci-fi artists, but he does all sorts of great explosions and drawing with gunpowder and fireworks and great documentary about all of his stuff. So, definitely would recommend that. I would also say just go to the Art21 website. If you’re not familiar with Art21, they do dives into contemporary artists and contemporary work. There are dozens. There’s maybe hundreds of episodes and other things to explore resources. Super easy to just get lost in everything that’s there and probably sparks some inspiration for your classroom too.

I don’t know if that’s of interest to you right now, but there’s definitely a lot there. Then finally, I don’t know if you’re looking for books or not, but I’m reading a book right now called Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker. She’s basically an investigative journalist, but she just decided like, “Hey, I want to incorporate myself into the art world. I want to break into the art world,” if you think of super fancy, very elitist art shows and galleries and whatever. She decides, “I want to be a part of this world and I want to see how this goes.”

So she dives in as a studio assistant, as a museum guard, as an art buyer, and takes on all of these roles to figure out everything that’s happening in the art world. It’s a fascinating concept. She’s a great writer. It’s a very, very good book. I’m about halfway through right now, so I don’t know how it’s going to end, but so far, it’s great and I would highly recommend that.

That’s fun.

Yeah, it’s a good one. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Okay, great.

Also, if anybody’s listening and you want to add anything to the recommendations list, please just shoot us an email. Maybe we can hit a few more things next month if we get some more recommendations. All right, our next question is from Amy. Amy says, “I have parent-teacher conferences coming up soon. They always go fine for me, but I’m wondering what your best response is to parents always saying, ‘I could never draw a stick figure.'” I feel like we’ve all heard this one million times.

Oh, my gosh.

Amanda, what is your best response to that?

I think I might just say, “Good news, we never draw stick figures in art.” When people tell me this, I just gently remind them that all things art takes practice. I talk about how it’s a common misconception that people are just born being good at art. Yes, people have natural inclinations for things, but you don’t just exist and know how to do everything. I think I just try to apply this logic to any other discipline. You know what I mean? Music, I could never play twinkle twinkle little star. I bet you could. I bet-

If you worked at it, I bet you could figure it out.

I also like to talk about with parents that art is more than drawing. Yes, drawing is an essential foundational skill that I do believe impacts other disciplines, but there are many, many skilled ceramicists and sculptors and fiber artists that don’t rely on “go-to realistic drawing” to make their work. So, I try, it maybe depends on if it’s the third time I’ve heard it or the 30th time I’ve heard it that even. But I think it can open up a fun and interesting conversation.

Yeah, I think so. I think it gives you the opportunity to just talk about what you want to talk about. If you think about the best athletes or coaches or politicians, when you ask them a question, they don’t really answer that question. They just talk about whatever they want to talk about, get their talking points out. So, that’s how I think about it, especially at conferences. So, like you said, just use that opportunity to either talk about the program or just hype up the kid that’s there and talk about how well they’re doing. So, yeah, whenever I hear that, I usually give a fake laugh. I’m like, “I’ve never heard that before. Oh, so funny.” But then, yeah, just use that opportunity, like you said, to talk about how art is way more than drawing.

We do drawing. Yes. I’m very good at teaching drawing. So, your kid will get better at that. But more importantly, we are becoming more creative. We’re doing problem solving and critical thinking and just talk about all of the other opportunities that are there in our class and how there are so many more things that we can do and then just talk about, “Hey, your kid is actually pretty good at this. The more they work, the better they’ll get.” They’re going to do all of these really cool things and just talk about all of the opportunities ahead and so many more things to do that go beyond just drawing there. So, I think a lot of parents say that because they don’t know about art, they don’t know what else to say. So, just use that as an opportunity to, in a very friendly way, just educate them and tell them a little bit more about what you’re teaching and what their kids will have the opportunity to do.

I think that’s a really good point actually. What they’re expressing is admiration for what you do. I can never do that. I can’t believe you can do that. So, I think assuming good intentions and then opening up whatever conversation you want to is a really good solution.

Yeah, excellent point. Assume good intentions no matter how many times you hear that. But yeah, just keep it on a positive note and I think that’s the best approach to dealing with that.

Yeah.

All right. Our next question comes from Sebastian in Maryland. Sebastian says, “My kids seem to be really good at destroying art supplies. Think broken rulers and snapped pencils and crushed crayons and pastels. We’re doing bookwork right now until I figure this out. I’m going to start with just pencil drawing and we’ll work our way back to more supplies. Is that the best approach? How do you deal with destructive students?”

Well, that’s a very positive way to frame it, to be really good at destroying art supplies. Also, that sounds really hard, and I’m sorry you’re dealing with that. It can be really disheartening, especially because we know our budgets are not often what we want them to be. So, if you have kids purposefully breaking the supplies, that is not okay on many levels. I do think it’s worthwhile thinking about what that behavior is trying to tell you. Behavior is a form of communication. So, what are they saying to you by destroying the supplies? It was interesting. This made me think of something that happened when I was student teaching. I was working in a really, really rough school with kids who didn’t have a lot of opportunities outside of the classroom for emerging activities.

The first time that my cooperating teacher got out paint with these kiddos, they were in kindergarten and probably half the class within two minutes had smeared the paint all over their hands and arms. We were like, “What is happening? What is happening?” In this case, they weren’t trying to be destructive, but they were being extremely messy, which was a problem. We realized, okay, these kids have never finger painted, right?

Yeah, they have no idea what the texture, the feel of this is.

Right. So, okay, take a step back. What tactile experiences can we give them in order to get that out of their system and let them experiment and explore? And then we teach them, okay, this paint, you use a brush to bathe in. So, I wonder if more novel supplies might captivate them or things that aren’t as easy to destroy or things that are meant to be squeezed or stretched or manipulated, right? So I don’t know what level you are working with. This obviously would be different if you’re talking about lower elementary versus middle versus high school. But if it’s elementary, pattern blocks, right? You can’t really destroy those, but you can make some really cool interesting designs with them or model magic or weaving.

For some reason, weaving always got my squirreliest kids to be quiet. That seems counterintuitive, but that worked for me. I don’t know. I also wonder about dry erase markers and personal dry erase boards. So, they’re drawing and then they can erase. I don’t know. I’m just thinking about what could captivate them. Also, all of this is with the caveat that it is important to teach them to respect materials. I like how you’re thinking about bringing it back to basics and working your way up from there. I do think if they are breaking the pencils every time, yes, they don’t get to use pencils. I think you’re on the right track. But I’m just trying to say think a little bit more outside of the box as to what might captivate them enough to engage them in the right way.

Then, the last thing I thought about is I think it’s a good idea to reign it in and then open up supplies as the students can prove they’re ready, but what does that look like? Could it be a gamification challenge? How do they unlock different materials? Can you connect it with video games? What parameters can you put in place? When they meet this challenge, then they get to use these supplies. So, I don’t know. The last thing I have is your mileage may vary, but with some kids who are being destructive, it sometimes works to appeal to the greater good and sometimes it doesn’t and they don’t care.

But sometimes kids don’t realize if I break this pencil, that means six other kids don’t get to use a pencil that day. These aren’t just your supplies, you’re not just here, and then in a bubble, you leave. The whole school uses these and so you’re actually destroying them for everybody. So, I don’t know. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Well, I think we’re at the point where we’ll try whatever, I want to speak for Sebastian, but if we’re down to just pencils at this point, I’m sure he’s open to a lot of different ideas. So, Sebastian asked, “Is this the right approach to go back to pencils then slowly open things back up?” I would say, “Yes, that is the right approach.” So short answer. Yeah, you’re on the right track. I was just going to talk about when I first started, erasers were a huge problem for me. We had the erasers because kids just love to rip them in half and they love to have them just disappear. They would get crumbled. They would get torn. They would get cut up.

Poked.

Oh yeah. Stabbing so many pencils. It’s such a disaster. So, it took me a long time to figure out how to actually make that work for my classroom. I tried a lot of things. I put together a bunch of kneaded erasers. So, I had a ball that I just carried around. I would break off a little bit for a kid when they needed it. Then they had to give it back when they were done. That actually worked okay. I cut erasers in half or in thirds, so they could not do that themselves. So, they have a smaller one to work with. If I knew kids were destroying it, I would pick up the pieces and then the next time they ask for an eraser, I would just give them a tiny piece. Then when they complain, oh, it’s the same one you had last time, what happened to it? So that helped a little bit.

Having individual sign-outs can work, that was not great for me because I didn’t love keeping track of that, but a sign-out sheet is good. Or if kids have to get up and walk across the room to pick up supplies, they’re less likely to use them a lot. It really cuts down on a lot of waste. Along with the individual sign-outs, a lot of times if you have everything together at a table and just one person in charge, whether that’s a bucket of supplies and just have one person to monitor the supplies and then when things don’t come back or things get destroyed, you can at least narrow down who’s doing it. Then I would just say if you can make clear consequences for destroying materials, a lot of times that can head off some things too like if you know who’s doing it.

You can figure that out through supply monitors or through sign out sheets or whatever else. I mean, consequences can be anything. First time’s a warning. Second time, you call home or talk to whoever’s at home. Third time, you lose those privileges. Make sure you have your processes in order and kids know what the consequences are for destroying things. Hopefully, taking it slow as you get back in will help you with the problem you’re trying to solve here. All right, go ahead. Go ahead.

Quick idea. Well, if you’re at the secondary level, I know a lot of teachers do art kits and this is dependent on your budget if you can do this or not. But essentially kids get two paint brushes, a pencil, a Sharpie, and eraser, and those are theirs for the entire quarter or semester, however long you have them. Once they run out or if they choose to destroy their own supplies, then sorry, you’re out of luck. So, teaching them ownership in that way. But again, that’s very dependent on a lot of factors, but just wanted to throw it in there.

No, I like that. I usually did that with my advanced courses. I usually did not trust my intro kids to hang onto their own stuff. But yeah, like I said, Sebastian, you know your classes better than anybody. You’ll know what’ll work for them. All right. Amanda, we’re to our final question. No, we are not. We have two. Oh, my goodness.

Two questions. I know.

Thank you. Okay, this comes from Kelsey Whaley in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Kelsey says, “Hi. I am a former high school art teacher and recently stepped over into the K-eight world to be with my own children at their school.” Congratulations, Kelsey. That’s a dream come true for a lot of people. I never thought the little kids would be for me, but I’m absolutely loving it. The hardest part about my day is keeping each class on the schedule with so many conflicts each week or getting pulled. I see each class for 45 minutes one time a week. So, if we miss Monday for instance, that whole day of classes gets behind the others. How do I keep them together? What do I do with the other ones while the ones behind catch up? At what point do you just move on? I’m loving your podcast weekly.

Thank you so much. All right. Well, Kelsey, thank you for the kind words about the podcast. My advice would be to talk to classroom teachers and see if there are things that they can finish in their classroom. Now, this obviously depends on if you think those teachers would be open to it, you’ll know best their personality, the curriculum they have to teach, whether they’re going to allow interruption. Very much it just depends on those classroom teachers. I think everybody who teaches elementary knows exactly what I’m talking about. But yeah, you’ll know best if that’ll work, but if you think it would, let them finish things up in their classroom. But I think it’s a good goal to keep classes aligned.

I think that is a lot less prep work for you. Just keeps things a lot more simple for you if you can keep your classes at the same place in the same order. If some classes are getting ahead, I would just look for one day lessons to keep them engaged for a day or early finish activities, whatever else you can do to just keep them engaged, keep them making art for a day or so while the other classes catch up. One more time, plug the show notes. You can search for one day lessons on the AOEU site. We’ll put a few of our favorites in the show notes. You’ll find a lot there.

Even if you just pull two, three, four of your favorite, that can get you through a lot as you try and get those classes aligned. Just give them an extra day to work while the other classes catch up. Find something fun for them to do that’s still creative, still worthwhile, and I think that’s probably your best solution to try and keep them aligned. So, Amanda, you have more elementary experience than I do. So, what would you say in this situation?

Yeah, I agree with trying to keep everybody together. It’s just so much easier. If I were you or probably by my second or third year of teaching, I was able to do this, but look ahead at the calendar for the next two to three months and figure out how many times you’re going to see each class in the timeframe and then you can adjust the lessons accordingly. So, if you see one class eight times and another seven times and another six times, you can handle that in a few ways. I think the easiest in a case like that would be to plan something cohesive for the six times that you’re going to see all the classes and then tack on some extension days for the other times or other classes that you will see.

So, that might mean extending the lesson. It might mean giving more of a free choice day, or I often used an extra class period to try to experiment with something that I’m not sure if I want to add to the curriculum where I’m not sure it was a good idea to do a grade level.

A test run of something basically.

Yeah, use it as a test run. I think another thing to do with extra class periods is to find a way to use up those materials you don’t have enough of to use with an entire grade level. People are always giving you 27 plain wooden spool. I thought of you, I was at a grad sale and thank you, but I can’t really do a whole lot with this. So, developing some fun projects to use up those materials is another way. Another option is just to build in an automatic catch-up day once every couple of months. So, you already know that you have an automatically built-in buffer for classes who might need to finish things or even kids who might need to just finish things. Okay. I have two more ideas, really quick.

These are good. We like all these ideas, take your time.

You can also have a set of five pre-planned extra lessons that could work for any grade level. So, think no to low prep drawing centers, read a book, do a project, whatever, and then you can just pull those out as needed. Maybe it’s as simple as you’re reading a book and then you have a drawing prompt and you’re using computer paper and markers. So, it’s just something you can pull out at a moment’s notice. The final thing I would say is don’t worry about cutting a project short or modifying it for a class. So, maybe one class doesn’t get through all the steps or maybe you make a certain class’s paper smaller so it takes less time. There’s a lot of ways that you can experiment and be flexible with this.

Wow, all great advice. Thank you. Appreciate all of those ideas and yeah, good luck. Would you like to bring us our final question, Amanda?

I would. So, our last question comes from the Art of Ed community. So, if you haven’t joined yet, what are you waiting for? You don’t even need to wait for us to answer your questions. You can just go there and post your burning questions and you’ll get excellent advice the very same day. We’ll stick the link again in the show notes, but you can also go to community.theartofeducation.edu, which I think I might’ve said wrong in the horror stories. So, sorry about that.

You know what? They’ll find it in the show notes. It’s okay.

They’ll find it in the show notes, right. Okay. So, come join us. It’s free. There are 3,000 teachers in there already, and it’s just like they have really good vibes.

It’s an amazing place to hang out. I really enjoy it.

It’s like social media, but only the good parts. So, anyway, come hang. Okay, so someone posted a really great question that had to do with project due dates and I thought it was going to be a good one to talk about here because there’s a lot of nuance and things to talk about. So, I got a really thoughtful discussion going, and essentially, they were asking other people to share how they handled late work. So, did people deduct points? How did people handle kids who rushed through to meet a due date versus students who took extra time but put in more effort? They were wanting to find a middle ground.

This was really great because another community member was like, “Oh, my gosh. I’m having the same issue.” So it can be really helpful to get your question answered, but also just to validate your feelings that you are not alone. Many people are dealing with the exact same things you’re wondering about.

Yes.

So I would love to give a little recap of what people said and then I want to know your thoughts.

Okay.

All right. So, the consensus was most community members had due dates, but then varied on how they accepted late work. So, some marked the work missing right away and gave it a zero if it wasn’t in by the due date. But then they let kids turn it in to change their grade at a later date. So, they use the zero to catch kids and parents if they’re paying attention, but then the kids had a chance to remedy that. That is how a lot of the teachers at my own kiddo schools handle things. I really appreciate it because the way that my kiddo’s language arts teacher put it is, “What is the goal here? If the goal is learning, then we give them a chance to learn.”

Some teachers took that idea a step further and said they only gave full credit if the student had a reasonable excuse for turning it in late. So, for example, if a kid is goofing off every day and choosing not to work in class, that is not a good excuse for taking three extra weeks, right? And then some teachers set a soft due date and then waited to set a hard due date until they gauged how most of the class was doing, which I thought was an interesting approach. Hey, we’re going to try to wrap up by Friday, but then if half the class is not anywhere near done, maybe that becomes a Wednesday.

So, you give them a last chance, which I thought was a good idea. Then of course, some teachers gave a due date and if the kids missed, they missed. The rationale there was that kids are going to be accountable to deadlines in “real life” and school is a pretty low risk place to learn that. So, I just appreciated the wide variety of perspectives. It was a really supportive and wonderful conversation. So, I think we can put a link right to that discussion.

Okay. Okay. We’ll do it. We’ll do it. All right. People are going to have nightmares after this episode. They’re going to try and lay in bed and all they hear in their head is just show notes, show notes, show notes.

So like I mentioned, just what I just said in our previous question, I built in that catch-up day, didn’t really deal with late work as a perpetual problem as an elementary teacher, but I’m curious to know what you did in your classroom today.

Well, the all of the above approach as I listened to you talk about this, yeah, I did that, I did that, I did that. I would just start off by saying I feel very strongly, I will not rant about this, but I don’t think that kids should lose points for turning things in late. It goes back to that and that question as I believe what your kid’s language arts teacher said, what are we grading? So I think teachers should ask themselves that. What are you grading? Is it academic and artistic growth or is it compliance? Are you grading what they’re learning or how good they are at following directions?

I guess when I was a young teacher, once upon a time, we were having this debate in a staff meeting and my principal said, “There are consequences in the real world if you don’t turn things in on time.” Then one of my colleagues just raised their hand and said, “What are the consequences for you not returning that email that I sent three days ago?” I was just like, “Oh.”

Burn.

Yeah. So, that was an excellent point. That very much clarified my thinking on that. Oh yeah, this is not as big of a deal, that real world excuse, that doesn’t work for me. So, yeah, I always went with pretty flexible deadlines and I would have kids help me decide when things are going to be turned in, especially my advanced classes. We’d just talk as a class like, “Hey, I was thinking about having this due on Thursday. Will that work for you?” or say like, “Hey, we’re going to do end of the week. If you need more time than that, raise your hand.” If 80% of the kids raise their hand, okay, we’ll see where we are at the end of the week and talk about next week. So, I think just communicating with them, that’s fine. Then you’re always going to have some kids who are super slow with things.

I always told them, “I don’t care when you turn it in, I want your best work. I don’t care when I get it, but I want it to be your best work.” So that gives them the time to get it to whatever level they think they need without a lot of extra pressure. I think that puts their mind at ease and then you don’t get kids rushing through things. I would never say everything’s due on Tuesday. I would say, “Hey, we’re going to move on after class on Tuesday. Whatever you have left is on your own.” Then same strategy of putting things into the grade book.

They can turn in a work in progress for partial credit or I’ll put in a zero and then I just had a standard email that I would just send home and say, “Hey, you may see this in the grade book. It’s because this work’s not due. They can turn it in at any time. We’re moving on in class, but it’ll be this in the grade book until they turn it in.” So it’s just literally a form email. I copy and paste every single time, so I don’t have to write that. But it’s super easy to just send a few emails home for kids who have that partial grade or that zero in the grade book, but it is a good way to keep track of what is still outstanding, what hasn’t been turned in.

So, anyway, I don’t know if I said anything new there beyond the suggestions that we already had from the community, but I feel like that was a pretty successful approach for me when I was running things. Okay. Thank you for that question, Amanda. Appreciate it. Now, before we wrap things up, I would like to try something new. Are you ready to play a game?

Oh, my gosh. Yes.

Okay. We are going to play this or that, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. I’m going to give you two options. You tell me which one you prefer, and we’re going to do Thanksgiving Food Edition. I really like this because you have some takes on food that I think are sometimes just unhinged. So, I would love to just get those out in the world for everyone else to appreciate as well. So, are you ready?

I am ready.

Okay. First one with this or that, Thanksgiving foods edition, turkey or ham?

Turkey. Ham is not a Thanksgiving food.

Okay, sounds good. Mac and cheese or green bean casserole?

Oh, my gosh. Okay. Green bean casserole because I cannot eat gluten.

Okay, fair.

I’m going to die if I eat the mac and cheese. I also do really love the green beans. I don’t know. I just love it.

I feel like just saying I will die if I eat the mac and cheese is probably a good enough answer, but no, that’s fair. Mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes?

Oh, my gosh. This is like choosing a favorite child. I’m going mashed potatoes. I like the sweet potatoes, not if they have marshmallows.

Yeah, that’s weird.

If they have too many eggs, they get to be a texture that I don’t appreciate. Sometimes they have eggs in them.

Yes, yes.

But mashed potatoes are good even when they’re bad.

All right. Pumpkin pie or apple pie?

No, no pies. I hate pie so much. I hate fruit. I hate hot fruits. I hate gelatin. I am not eating a pie. I’ll eat a pecan pie if it is almost just nuts. None of the goop really. Imagine nuts held together by maple syrup in a pie crust. I like that, or a French silk pie. Do you eat a pie? Do you eat pie?

I don’t like pie. No. I will eat a French silk pie. But other than that, no.

This is a pie-free podcast.

Pie-free podcast. I love it. All right. Okay. On your pecan pie, if we can convince you to eat one, would you put ice cream or would you put whipped cream?

Oh, I would put whipped cream. The ice cream is too soggy and I don’t like the mix of temperatures, but I also don’t really like a spray whipped cream. It has to be real. The spray whipped cream is a little too shiny for my liking. I’ll eat it, but I don’t prefer it. Cool Whip is a hard pass in case that was a follow-up question.

It was not. I have one final question. I have not talked to you about this before, so the phrasing may off, but I think I’m right with it. Cranberry sauce from a can or literally anything else?

Literally anything else. Why would you eat cranberry Jello? Why would you eat Jello? Look, I love my mother-in-law so much, but there is this recipe called pink Jello, and it is opaque Jello. It’s at every family function. One time my older kid, when he was three, he put it between two halves of a hamburger bun and he ate it and I almost died. So, anyway, no cranberries. No, thank you. No fruits. I’d eat a pumpkin pie over a cranberry anything.

Okay. That’s what I thought you were going to say. So, that’s why I put literally anything else.

Is that a food you’d eat?

But I’m glad that worked out. What’s that?

Is that a food you’d eat?

Oh goodness. No.

I didn’t think so. We’ve not talked about it, so just double-checking.

Yeah, no, thank you. That is good.

With the ridges from the can. I can’t.

Well, I think we will wrap it up there. Amanda, thank you for bringing community questions. Thank you for your vulnerability when it comes to show notes. Thank you for all of your great advice. So, it’s been fun. Let’s do it again next month.

Sounds great. Bye, everybody.

Thanks again to Amanda. It was a very fun episode. If you have questions you would like to send in for our next mailbag, please email timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu or podcasts@theartofeducation.edu. So much talk today about the show notes. So, again, if you can’t find them, just go into your podcast app or wherever you’re listening, click on the description of the podcast, and scroll down. You should be able to see the resources and links. If not, look for a button on your tab that says more or see more. That will take you right to them. This week we will link to our Netflix recommendations info on parent-teacher conferences, one-day lessons, the AOEU Community, resources on grading, probably a few other things as well.

We talked about a lot today, but we’ll link to as many things as possible that we think may be helpful for you. Hopefully, those links and those resources can hold you over until we’re back next week. Art Ed Radio is produced by The Art of Education University with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. We will be back next week with an episode on advocacy in the art room and Dr. Theresa Haugen will be my guest.

Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Please be sure to subscribe to Art Ed Radio, so we can join you again. Please jump over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen. Give us a five-star rating. Maybe even leave us a review. We’ll talk to you next week.