EC – Class Evaluation – ART110 2:30 PM

I really enjoyed this class because, as a Freshman, there were a lot of things such as the SOA Galleries that I hadn’t known about yet and probably wouldn’t have ever, or would have waited until my senior, to explore so I am glad that this course forced me to go out of my comfort zone and introduced me to new things. I would DEFINITELY recommend this course to anybody looking to destress and relax; many of the activities that we did allowed for very therapeutic meditation sessions and deep thinking which I thoroughly enjoyed. One thing I especially loved and thank Glenn for is having some of the actives, especially towards the end, be more career and “life goal” oriented; I liked how introducing us to WordPress, mentioning LinkedIn, having us think about our future are all things that we can use in our professional careers, not just for the class – therefore giving us the necessary tools to succeed! Although I am, as mentioned, just a Freshman, I’m glad I got introduced to these things early on in my college career since I remember as a senior in high school, one of the things I hated most was being told on my last year of school, “oh, you should have been doing this since Freshman year”, which I hadn’t done since no one ever took the time my Freshman  year of high school to tell me the things I had to have been doing so, THANKS GLENN! 🙂 Lastly, I really enjoyed the freedom of the class – I find being in a class really stifling and suffocating and I really enjoyed being able to work outside with fresh air, in the galleries – it was very relaxing. The pot luck at the end of the semester as our final was pretty great too, it was one of my favorite things that we did together as a class all semester :’) PS: I just thought of this right now but just as a suggestion for one of the games for the next final, maybe you could ask students if they want to play something like Twister, it would definitely be funny to watch and play!

As for Slack and WordPress, I really enjoyed both! I liked WordPress a lot actually and plan to use it as a portfolio once I am done with the course! I liked the Slack posts but I didn’t really enjoy the comments just because I felt like many students would always agree and just rephrase what I had said in my post, in their comment(s) just to get their assignment over with therefore adding no extra intellectual input to what I was saying, buuuutttt as for the videos I thoroughly enjoyed them!

 

Some of my favorite activities were:

Designing Your Life– *horror music* This one was a little scary, especially when the years went up to like +2030 but I think this one is the most important to think about since we are after all in college and after this, unless someone plans to go to grad school, the life we have always known which consists of routine and going to school every day or so, is over. I think it would be cool if, instead of having this be the last assignment for the semester, it was one of the first ones so that students, especially seniors, have time to sit down and really think about what they want to do and how/ what they can do to achieve that as the semester, and year, progresses and graduation approaches rather than force them to think about it right before they graduate. The last assignment could be something like giving credit based on the things they wrote down that they actually achieved (points given by showing proof) such as a letter of acceptance for that internship they had been eyeing and so on – that way, it would act as more motivation to stop putting things off and actually do it.

Graffiti Writing– I didn’t actually get to go to Venice Beach with the rest of the ART110 crew and instead opted to do it at home but this was really cool to do even at home so I can only imagine how cool it would have been to actually go to the beach and do this whilst drinking some of Glenn’s famous iced tea 🙂

Art Care Package– I was going to write about plaster casting as my last bullet but I unfortunately didn’t get to do that one (although I’m sure I would have loved it had I done it) but the art care package I gave to my mom when she was feeling down, was one of my favorites because of how emotionally invested I was into it; it enticed me to look into my old box of childhood things to find things like old cassette tapes I hadn’t listened to in a while, and just made me feel really warm inside overall.

Some of the activities I didn’t like include:

Zines & Flipbooks– I thought this was a little too easy and maybe it is because I did a flip book and not a zine, I would have liked to have something a bit more complicated or… aesthetically beautiful but I guess that’s my own fault.

Automatic Drawing– Same as with the zines and flip books, it was too easy and I felt the assignment was not all that clear. I know that the point of the assignment was to relax but I think if students had a picture they had to memorize and then try to recreate, it would have made the activity a little bit easier to understand, and harder but more fun to create- or better yet, have students listen to a song with many beat changes like rap or edm and somehow try and have them project their emotions onto the paper whenever the rhythm changes (i.e. if a beat drop scared them, they could draw a peak in one of their lines to signify their heart rate went up at that moment, something like that 🙂 )

Classmate Conversations– I didn’t like that we were forced to make friends. I ADORE making friends and in college, I have found, it is harder since everyone sort of sticks to the people they already know and kind of just puts on their earphones and keeps to themselves but making friends should be natural. A lot of the time this made me kind of sad because I could tell that someone just wanted to talk to me to “use me” for the assignment , no matter how hard I tried to make the conversation natural and not have it be like an assignment. The questions also got very repetitive like “what’s your major”, “what year are you in” etc. and I feel like one of the positives that this assignment could have presented (aka. meet and make friends) suddenly turned sour since I don’t feel like I bonded with many of the people I spoke to 😦 I think a better way to improve this could be to have multiple worksheets available on BeachArts or Slack with maybe 7 or 8 random questions that are unusual like:

-“what’s something on your bucket list of things you want to do before you die”

-“what is a random fear you have that you find embarrassing”

-“what is your most used app/ social media”

-“tell me a random childhood story ”

“what is a food you would be mortified to try”

-or the most important of all….”do you like pineapple on pizza?”….because people are haters. *judgmental eye squint*

and then in their wordpress posts, students could title it as Wk?? – Classmate Conversation – (Persons Name) – Worksheet #1 (or whatever worksheet they decided to use that week). This would allow students to maybe bond on a more personal level since they could bond over a love or fear they share or go follow their social media and actually meet up and hang out later on or they could just have funnier more interesting conversations!!