Reflection

Reflection
Saturday, October17, 2009

The day was started with registration in the lobby of Grady High School Theater around 8.30am. By 9.00 all participants are seated inside the theater for the general session

Session one began with the introduction of administrative staff and faculty: Project Director; Cynthia S. Terry, Assistant project Director; Raymond Veon, Evaluator; Dr. Melody Milbrant, Consultants; Dr. Patrick Free and Dr. Marilyn Seelman, Collaborators; The Hammonds House and Atlanta Partners for Arts in Education (APAL).Teachers team 3, Aesthetic; Lisa Whittington and Artistic; John Brandhorst these two were to be my course teachers for the rest of the year. Course content, expectations and rules were presented by the director of projects Cynthia Terry.
We then break for 15 minutes and came back into our small groups, our first session was an aesthetics class. The purpose for this class was for each individual to define his or her concept of aesthetics lead by Mercy Simmons and William J. Earvin. Some of the definitions give to aesthetics for the class were 1. Appreciation of the arts based on personal experience 2. Wholeness of being, 3. Values and structure of an art form 4. Making connections and 5. Expression through emotions (cognitive)
The dictionary defines aesthetics as 1. The study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty. 2. Criticism of taste. 3. The study of psychological aspects of beauty, especially with the components thereof as they relate to appreciation.

This class was followed by Lisa’s class were she introduced us to the world of blogging and gave us the expectation for the class. It was a whole new mind for me since this was my first day of blogging.
The next class was Barry Stewart Mann from The Atlanta Partnership for Arts Learning. It was a group warm-up activity entitled “Antagonists and Allies. The objectives for the activities were (a.) To warm-up voice, body and imagination. (b) To cultivate ensemble/community, and (c) To provide a basis for reflection through concepts from course text book by Daniel Pink. At the end of the activities which I think was creative and interesting, participants listen to a series of questions for each of the Six Senses in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and responded to it in a form of class discussion and reflection. I hope to introduce this activity as an ice-breaker at the beginning of each session for the four quarters in my school.

Other sessions for the day were introduction to VTS by Raymond Veon and Reinvention of the artist within by John Brandhorst (Teacher as Artist Workshop)
The day ended with a Descriptive, Analytical and Reflective writing class the lesson learnt her was to be applied to our blogging on our new blogs created.
At the end of the day as I drive home, I was not sure if I understood everything clearly but one thing I know is that winners don’t quit and therefore I am not going to quit this class. Let see how it will go.

Martin Mensah
October 18, 2009