Something a Little Different...

In years past, I have had the eighth graders at St. Peter the Fisherman Catholic Grade School (where I teach) create and build a mini-golf course out of cardboard and found objects. The theme was similar to the Putting Around the World, shown in the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell 1985 movie Overboard. Granted the movie’s budget was bigger then mine at school, but we did quite well and the rest of the school was entertained too.

This year I decided to change it up. Many reasons were explained to this group of eighth graders and one of them was the sheer size of their class. 20 students! That would mean the 18 hour course would have to be 20 holes. Too big. I also thought of teams of two for some of the students….that would not seem fair. Storage itself was not accessible for 16 holes, can you imagine 20? The big reason was that I did not want the majority of the year to go like last year’s free-for-all class. Yes, there were some good designs and work from a few of students was fine, but there seemed to be some rotten apples that ruined the experience. So this year I decided that the eighth graders will learn a little about publishing a comic book or graphic novel.

This has been an idea for some time and a few years ago it was implemented with some home-schooled students through the library. I had 9 students who would research, design, ink and draw their comic page. The project itself was a success, and there were only a few bumps that derailed us. One was that a student did not want to attend classes or do anything. But considering that, most of the work that the students did was fine.

I had a local printer print 20 copies of the book and gave each student a copy. They could purchase extra copies and all of them were sold. The whole project took less then 2 months.

Jump ahead to this year. It seems the students are bogged down in other activities that they do not want to work at the project. I have had the same students show me the same drawings they had done 3 weeks ago as “new, improved” designs. Basically the majority of the class thinks that our Monday class is a “catch-up” to last weeks class or an extra study-hall, and no work is ever done on their own.

I have told each student to research their subject and find an interesting storyline. Some did. Some did not. Most of the stories go like this…”Artist was born, he liked to draw, became a painter, went to school, got married, got depressed, died, THE END.” I wanted more interesting aspects like how Picasso was born dead, Mary Cassatt entering a male dominated art world, Van Gogh dealing with depression. What I had gotten was 20 versions of the same story with little effort or activity.

Needless to say, the students are still working on this project. I hope they can finish soon and that maybe they will learn something from it. I do realize that this is a generation of students that do not work. I am not saying they like or dislike work, they just don’t work at all. They are lazy. They also expect maximum benefits for minimal amount of work. They do not like criticism or critical analysis. This is how they were raised for 14 years of their life. Plus the internet was always at their fingertips. Why read a book that was researched, when you can go to Wikipedia and find that Joe C student added a comment that Picasso had ADD (which he did not).

As I write this I have found out that most of eighth grade students only work on this project when they are in class. That is not a productive sign. I hope that they will work a little harder in the future and we can get this graphic novel finished before it is too late. The publishing deadline is coming soon! I will keep you up to date on their progress.

Comments

[Dan Sage]

Thanks Dean for the post!