What I really leaned by teaching this class was how to go with the flow and be flexible. The activity that we gave our students was to draw a story board answering this prompt: You place your halloween candy in a secret spot. When you go back to eat your candy, its gone. What happened with your candy? (did someone take it and if so who and why?). After a while with letting our students draw and come up with their ideas, I noticed that some of them were not 100% following the prompt and the first thing I wanted to do was tell them that they should go back and revisit what we asked them to follow. I then made the quick decision to allow the students to keep working on what they had already come up with because I thought back to my essential understanding questions and outcomes with what I wanted them to get out of the lesson. In the past, I would have probably been strict and ask them to change what they were doing, but allowing them to self explore taught me that next time I can just offer the prompt as a guiding idea for students who cannot come up with their own story on their own. It also changed how I consciously think back to what I had wrote in my lesson plan for what I want them to learn where in the past I didn't make those small conscious decisions.Â
 I think as artist we need to have that balance of being conscious of what our essential goal is that we want to evoke or visually share; on the other hand, we also need to take a step back every once in a while to let the painting (or circumstance in terms of teaching) rest for a bit and let it be. I see this evident in the painting that I did for this journal entry where I had the balance of both the decision process in terms of what I wanted to evoke while at the same time knowing when I needed to step back and let the painting be at rest.
While keeping the idea of the change that I made in mind, I thought that I would use a different material this time. In this case, I chose to use foam board as my canvas but I kept my overall artistic approach with drawing lines over in the end the same. The effect ended being incredibly different yet beautiful.Â
Making changes from what your'e used to in the past is important in both teaching and my own art experience because it proves the positive possible outcomes that might occur. I think that sometimes we can get stuck in what is comfortable but we really need to remember that we as educators and artists always need to make changes and take risks. We can take certain things that we like from one area and apply them to our goals while also avoided the mistakes or areas we don't like in them as well.