What the heck do you look like?

[Artyczar]

Thanks Jocelyne. Sounds good. I'm just doing what my doctor is telling me to do and it's working. It's just a basic calorie counting system. smaller portions, etc.

 

[stlukesguild]

Part of our online teaching presence involves employing Bitmoji classrooms and Bitmoji self portraits that the kids can relate to. Here's me as a Bitmoji:

 

[brianvds]

Part of our online teaching presence involves employing Bitmoji classrooms and Bitmoji self portraits that the kids can relate to. Here's me as a Bitmoji:

And what, pray tell, is a Bitmoji?

 

[stlukesguild]

A personalized emoji. It's essential to know all the latest pop culture when you are teaching.

 

[musket]

I was a smart kid, like it or not (for the most part it brought me nothing but trouble). I would have immediately dismissed this gimmick as a transparent fraud, a clumsy attempt by adults to somehow convince me to "relate to them" with a lame cartoon self-portrait. It took a lot more than that for me to relate to any adult, starting with a reasonable amount of respect for my intelligence.

 

[PaintBoss]

Raised by very serious parents, and being a serious type myself, I would have adored a light hearted adult and approach.
How do I make one?

 

[Iain]

"Get in touch with your inner child."

There they are:

I would have adored a light hearted adult and approach.

 

[stlukesguild]

Why do I get the feeling that Musket was old and jaded before his time? Over the years I have found that my students become much more engaged with art projects if there is a link to something they already know and like: Sponge Bob, Zombies, Emojis, Angry Birds, Batman, the Joker, Wonder Woman, Frankenstein & Dracula, Elves & Rudolph at the holidays, etc... I have a girl right now who wants to draw a pink pony or unicorn. We just completed a project on using simple lines and shapes to draw the pigeon from the book that most have read in their homeroom class: "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus"...

I'll try to do a pony and tie it in to a focus on one of the Art Elements or Principles of Design.

 

[Artyczar]

Before the haircut.

 

[musket]

According to my late little sister, I was a cynical little old man by the time I was nine.

That's not a Bitmoji, Arty.

 

[laf.art]

Why do I get the feeling that Musket was old and jaded before his time? Over the years I have found that my students become much more engaged with art projects if there is a link to something they already know and like: Sponge Bob, Zombies, Emojis, Angry Birds, Batman, the Joker, Wonder Woman, Frankenstein & Dracula, Elves & Rudolph at the holidays, etc... I have a girl right now who wants to draw a pink pony or unicorn. We just completed a project on using simple lines and shapes to draw the pigeon from the book that most have read in their homeroom class: "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus"...

I'll try to do a pony and tie it in to a focus on one of the Art Elements or Principles of Design.

I found the same when teaching English as a second language, pop culture is a very useful tool, including of course, music.

 

[musket]

Pop culture is fine. Bitmojis aren't.

Maybe stlukes could present himself as Art-Man, scourge of museum-going prigs and bogus conceptual artists. Complete with utility belt-- razor sharp palette knives, brushes that double as light daggers, boomerang palette, poisonous paints, explosive pastels, canvas cape of invisibility and the Artmobile, which camouflages itself into appropriate works of art from the Met or the Tate; it can disguise itself as an Egyptian sarcophagus, shrink down to the size of a Vermeer, replicate a recreation of the bathroom at CBGB, and look like a dead ringer for an unmade bed or a shark in a tank.

I was a weird little kid.

 

[PaintBoss]

My hubby has terrible dyslexia. And he learned to hate school.He had very impatient even some abusive teachers. They thought it was his attitude.They told him he was “retarded”. He would only end up pumping gas. They didn’t pick up on the fact he had dyslexia. He finally got a teacher who let him use comic books to engage him in wanting to read. He also let him take tests verbally which showed he was comprehending. It’s fine to think out of the box or meet kids where they have interests. Many concepts can be taught this way. My mother was a special ed teacher for many grades. She utilized this a great deal. No time for snobbery. Get the kids engaged to learn. Often they took off after that. I have so many memories of hearing her name called in public in cities all over and some young adult- (some quite tough looking) running up and throwing their arms around my mother thanking her. Clearly moved to see her. They all said she was the one teacher who really cared, got through to them, helped them. I remember her at night speaking about students (anonymously)she was concerned about. Strategizing how to reach them. It wasn’t just subject matter, she taught students who had horribly sad and abusive homes and backgrounds. Some threatening parents. One very threatening teen who later became a notorious rapist and murderer. (They taxied him to her country school because others couldn’t handle him. She said later she could never turn her back to him or he would try to get her). Those are stories in themselves. She said she always related to these kids because she was a misfit herself.
As far as the misfit term, she thought there was nothing wrong with these kids. It’s one of the first things she told them. They carried negative baggage and labels from teachers, family and just struggling to do well in school. But she knew they felt they were misfits because they didn’t fit easily into school because of difficulties. The system is better suited to strong students.

 

[PaintBoss]

I started by saying my mother was serious. As a teacher she was with her own kids! Expectations.

 

[Iain]

I don't believe the pigeon can drive the bus. Would make a good navigator though.

I had a bad experience with a pigeon. I was sitting on a bench having lunch next to a busy corner when a car hit one. The bird went up and came down, alive but unable to move. I sat there as the cars turned, one after the other, inches from the bird, its head swivelling on the oncoming. A woman sat next to me. She didn't seem to see the bird and the cars inches from it. I got up and walked back to work. I was the lawyer in Camus' The Fall. I was an Ass Sol (Associated Solicitor).

I was writing this while Paintboss was - posting.

 

[musket]

Comic books are cool, I loved them as a kid straight through my mid-twenties. But they ain't the same thing as Bitmojis, which are just silly. For that matter, I'm no fan of emojis either.

 

[Iain]

View attachment 4804

Before the haircut.

I best your tongue does stick out like this when you draw, deep in concentration. Very cute, cool observation.

 

[stlukesguild]

I found the same when teaching English as a second language, pop culture is a very useful tool, including of course, music.

That's where I draw the line. I can't stand most pop music of the last couple of decades (there are exceptions, of course) and especially rap and hip-hop (again, with exceptions). Of course, the kids hate my music as well. I remember playing Miles Davis Kind of Blue during a middle school class. I had one boy come up to me and beg me to stop playing it as it was torture.

 

[stlukesguild]

I was a weird little kid.

Indeed.

My students loved Angry Birds and Sponge Bob and Emojis, Bitmojis, and Tik-Tok. And of course, Disney. I can't tell you how many little African-American girls dressed up for the school Holloween party as Elsa... the blondest of the blonde. The greatest costume, however, was this little girl dressed in a smart business dress carrying a briefcase who was Michelle Obama!

The art-historical stuff that the kids like best are "sugar skulls" from the Mexican Day of the Dead and the art of ancient Egypt. They especially love it when I show them the canopic jars where the Egyptians "preserved" the various bodily organs, and the hooks that they used to pull the brains out of the skull because they thought these were useless tissues like fat.

 

[musket]

I can definitely see the last. Kids love nothing better than a good gross out.