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art museum tours
Jan. 31st, 2019 04:51 pmI gave my fourth school tour at Seattle Art Museum today, and it went very well! The block that I'm in this quarter includes three different tours that teachers can choose from, all geared toward students from grades four to about twelve (realistically, most high school groups that come to the museum are self-guided - the oldest kids I've had so far have been eighth grade), and by chance I had all three types of tours in my first three weeks, so today was my first repeated tour. Hooray! Finally I get to start feeling like I really know what's going on! This was especially the case since the tour I did today, Perspectives (designed to mix art with science, technology, engineering and math), was the same tour I gave last week, albeit for 5th graders today instead of 8th graders last week. That was a bit of a mental shift, and it's always tough to get a sense quickly of where the kids are at and what they already know (for instance, this group already knew parallel vs. perpendicular lines, which I had very much not counted on from 5th graders), but we made it through.
My one sticking point on tours so far has been keeping track of my time at each stop, and this time I was especially nervous since we started a bit late, but I managed to effectively trim a little extra off the first stop and keep things moving well enough through the rest that I could allow the kids a few minutes at the end to just wander some of the upstairs galleries -- a big relief to me, since one kid had expressed particular interest in taking pictures of some of the African art for his family, and a little Muslim boy was very curious to see the Islamic art collection, neither of which we're able to use much while focusing on perspective (though I do use an Egyptian piece for metric perspective).
Next week is a week off, then I have a Living Histories (Native Northwest Coast art) tour the week after, and the rest of the quarter is mostly that tour, with the occasional Perspectives tour thrown in. Not many teachers select the last tour, Artistic Choices, which is too bad because that's the one where we can really show off the breadth of the collection and have fun with more abstract pieces that kids tend to really love. Ah well. I got one of those in, at least, this quarter.
So far I've been really pleased with all the groups of kids I've had - every now and then kids get pretty squirrelly, but they've all been really good-natured and can generally be coaxed into engaging with the material if I'm patient with them and occasionally bring up comparisons to things like video games and comic books. I'm honestly more likely to resent a teacher who's too uptight about museum conduct than otherwise, so far -- while I appreciate that they have to deal with the kids every day and I only have them for an hour, it was hard when I had a class a few weeks ago whose teacher wanted them literally whispering in the galleries, because then I have a tough time hearing the kids when they answer or ask questions. I don't want kids yelling or running wild, and I certainly have to maintain safety for them and the art, but normal indoor voices are fine, and I will tell them if they're getting too loud or rowdy. Ah well. Everybody's got their own style with these things...
My one sticking point on tours so far has been keeping track of my time at each stop, and this time I was especially nervous since we started a bit late, but I managed to effectively trim a little extra off the first stop and keep things moving well enough through the rest that I could allow the kids a few minutes at the end to just wander some of the upstairs galleries -- a big relief to me, since one kid had expressed particular interest in taking pictures of some of the African art for his family, and a little Muslim boy was very curious to see the Islamic art collection, neither of which we're able to use much while focusing on perspective (though I do use an Egyptian piece for metric perspective).
Next week is a week off, then I have a Living Histories (Native Northwest Coast art) tour the week after, and the rest of the quarter is mostly that tour, with the occasional Perspectives tour thrown in. Not many teachers select the last tour, Artistic Choices, which is too bad because that's the one where we can really show off the breadth of the collection and have fun with more abstract pieces that kids tend to really love. Ah well. I got one of those in, at least, this quarter.
So far I've been really pleased with all the groups of kids I've had - every now and then kids get pretty squirrelly, but they've all been really good-natured and can generally be coaxed into engaging with the material if I'm patient with them and occasionally bring up comparisons to things like video games and comic books. I'm honestly more likely to resent a teacher who's too uptight about museum conduct than otherwise, so far -- while I appreciate that they have to deal with the kids every day and I only have them for an hour, it was hard when I had a class a few weeks ago whose teacher wanted them literally whispering in the galleries, because then I have a tough time hearing the kids when they answer or ask questions. I don't want kids yelling or running wild, and I certainly have to maintain safety for them and the art, but normal indoor voices are fine, and I will tell them if they're getting too loud or rowdy. Ah well. Everybody's got their own style with these things...
