I’m just back from 3 hours of marketing, gathering ingredients for our part of the Thanksgiving feast. If the stores had been playing carols, it would have been more spirit-inducing, but I still get all holidaze-ish when I’m purchasing yams, pie shells and camping snacks! Devon arrives later today, and we drive to Death Valley Wednesday morning. In between I have a list of to-do’s, so this will have to be short.
Just wanted to post a few snaps from our AOAT field trip to MOCA yesterday – a gorgeous sunny crisp idyll downtown, with nary a worry after I got it all organized up front. 6 teachers rode the buses with about 100 students from 9-12th grade. We split them into two tour groups for the hour in the museum with educators leading small discussion groups, and the rest of the day is their own to explor
e the area, which features Disney Hall, Central Library, Grand Central Market, the new Cathedral, Music Center, California Water Court, B of A Plaza (where a weekly market was going on), etc. A group of the seniors even hoofed it all the way over to China Town! We teachers always enjoy this twice-annual trip and the kids do, too.
The artist in me loves to go look at art and then make art. So my inner artist is very happy tonight after two days of those favorite things! Yesterday I went to CAEA (Calif.Art Educators Assoc.) annual conference which is in LA this year. I helped Aazam with her workshop presentation, then we participated in a 3-hour “master class” where a working artist presents a technique and medium then you experiment with it. The subject was painting with ink and color ink, and we had fun messing about. The instructor didn’t teach at the “master” level – it was rather rudimentary – but the supplies were fun and it sure beat being in the classroom on a gorgeous Friday! Today Aazam, Paola and I went to a teacher workshop at the Getty, on another perfect crisp sunny breezy day in LA. Yummy continental breakfast, an interesting working artist speaker, gallery visit to a terrific Irving Penn photography exhibit, lunch, then a
studio project around the theme “What is Work and who is the Worker”. We high school teachers (there were various grade level groups) got to make relief prints using styrofoam plates, inspired by Millet’s farm hand resting on his hoe. Then another gallery visit to see the painting we’d been looking at reproductions of, and then a wrap up with whole group. The Getty does these a couple times a year – completely free – and supplies materials, a massive curriculum with hi res images on CD, and today they even had “gift books” that we could choose from! What a nice day.
Hopefully this warm fuzzy feeling will carry me through tomorrow’s grading!! 10 week reports are due so I have hours of that chore facing me – maybe I’ll just make art in between stacks!!
I guess 2009 is officially almost over!! We’re counting down to our annual Thanksgiving camping trip, and Christmas is only scant weeks thereafter – wasn’t it just new year’s?? I like the holiday spirit, but always get stressed about shipping gifts to the other coast. I prefer to make gifts, so that means planning even further ahead. Oh well – early is all gone already…
I’m excited to be out of school several times this month. Tomorrow I’m going to the Calif. art teachers annual conference, this year taking place locally. I’m helping fellow teacher Aazam present a workshop, then will attend a few workshops before we head home. And Saturday 3 of us are going to a teacher workshop at the Getty. We’re even trying to get paid for our hours with professional development funds, which would be very nice. Next Friday I’m part of the group taking our Academy students to MOCA, which is always a pleasant day off campus. The exhibit may not be too exciting since it’s a retrospective from their collection, and I’m sure we’ve seen several of the pieces on previous visits over the last 6 year. 
I’m enjoying most of my students this semester – not many “stars” but lots of really good kids. Grades are due again next week, and that’s the worst part of teaching: keeping up with grading all the work. Better than lots of jobs I can think of, and it does touch lots of young people in their formative years. I hope they will remember my class with affection.
Today is the last of our family birthdays for the year. I started it rolling in August, then Whit in September, Devon at the end of October and Mercer 6 days later. Unfortunately, that means he usually gets shortchanged because more energy goes into the girls’ days. We just went out for dinner and I promised him a head rub – if we don’t both fall asleep! This daylight savings switch always makes me sleepy early.
Weekend before last we stopped by the “Day of the Dead” family festival in Canoga Park where our Art Club kids were volunteering their face-painting skills. The Youth Art Center was filled with student creations, from masks to self-portrait photos to offrendas and really colorful skeleton shadow boxes. I snapped shots of the students at work, and also photographed the shiny bike twins above – beautiful chrome cruisers that sparkled in the sunset. Whit, eat your heart out!
November has lots of days off for me: from Veteran’s Day to an Art Educator conference to a field trip to the art museum, and finally the Wednesday before Thanksgiving which I always take off so we can head out camping. It will be Christmas before we know it!!
We have such a mix of weather in the fall that dressing is a daily challenge. On Wednesday last week it was raining and high in the 60’s then by Friday it was sunny and high in the low 90’s! One good part of autumn is the slow ripening of the pomegranates on our front yard tree. Some fruits are ripe in early September but most are just turning all the way red now in mid October. They are beautiful to look at and delicious to eat, but in between someone has the laborious task of opening and prying the tiny fruit-seeds out of the fibrous maze that hides them. I usually do 2 or 3 at a time since that takes about 40 minutes – then have a week’s supply of rosy gems for snacking on with plain yogurt – yum!
Here are two shots of Mercer’s from last Sunday’s wedding of Clayton and Carly in La Jolla. It was a lovely event in a charming setting, but I was still feeling too sad from the Saturday memorial to really enjoy the usual joy that weddings provide.
It’s chilly here this morning and finally feeling like fall – too crisp to wash my filthy car, but maybe later…Mercer had a good quick trip up to visit Devon at Santa Cruz. They attended the campus memorial for Austin, and Mercer got to see Devon’s apartment complex which has views of the ocean. She’s got all her classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays this quarter – lots of time off for a JOB!! Now just has to land one.
School is going OK for me – only foresee a few problem students. One with hostile attitude, and several with very low ability. A couple of the Academy students appear to not take any initiative so they will also become thorns in my productivity-centered curriculum. Not bad on the whole.
Tomorrow we are hosting a preview screening after school of the new season of the PBS series “art:21″ – hopefully with it right after school we’ll get a bigger attendance than in the past when we held it at 6 p.m.
And I thought I’d finished my grading yesterday until I remembered the digital projects that I have to grade on-screen or print out, so “sigh” – more grading today. Mercer is pooped from his trek north and not eager to go out, so less pressure on me to finish early. I think I may go for a bike ride in the crisp morning air before I buckle down to business…
Whitney made an unexpected visit home this week – always wonderful to see her, but this time the reason was a heartbreaking death. Our dear friends the Plummers lost their 20-year old son in a hiking accident in Yosemite last Sunday. It was a terrible loss, a crushing shock, a very sad tragedy beyond words or comprehension. We had our kids the same years and learned parenting together, the kids becoming like California cousins, sharing birthday parties and special occasions. Austin went to UC Santa Cruz in the same year with Devon, but he had more similar passions to Whitney: biking, music, cooking, and unique personal style. From the shared memories of his friends at the memorial yesterday, a picture of a truly remarkable renaissance young man with an old soul emerged. I wish I had known him better. I don’t know how Renee and Michael will bear the pain in the coming years.
I was doing so well keeping up my new blog this summer, but when I flew off to Chicago August 25, I took a break from ether-journaling. I did take lots of photos, however, and will list here the links to my Picassa albums for a wonderful almost two week trip…
The composite shots above are from my last stop September 6th in Mechanicsville, VA, before I flew home to LA. That’s Mama (89.5) on the left laughing at our antics, then Daddy (90) in his kitchen fixing watermelon for us, then his just finished knitting project, and the knitter modeling his cold weather chapeau while I mime the chills. Daddy returned to knitting, a skill he learned in the mid-sixties while he was in the hospital for an extended stay, because he thought it would be good therapy for his recent hand tremors. He reports an improvement, and is now attempting to get a knit scarf going, but is not taking any orders for his output yet!
Here are the links to photos – it was a great trip, from spending time with Whitney in Chicago, to my high school 40th reunion in Virginia, to our 5-day art retreat in the Smoky Mountains – great memories to last me through the school year. If they don’t link when you click, just copy/paste into your browser address line:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/Chicago09Tuesday#
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/Chicago82609#
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/ChicagoDay3#
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/RoadrunnerReunion#
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/SmokyMountainScenics#
http://picasaweb.google.com/dk.mercer/SmokeyFamilyReunion#
http://picasaweb.google.com/cathy.tyler/SmokyMountainArtRetreat?authkey=Gv1sRgCNmn7ZCIyKXqRA&feat=email#
Whit’s friend Marjorie was so kind to come over and cut Devon’s hair for her – it’s really like cutting 2-3 heads since her hair is unbelievably thick! The results are so cute – shorter than Devon had wanted, but her hair grows so fast it will be perfect in a couple weeks. She had to go back up to Santa Cruz today, and tomorrow I fly to Chicago – yippee! Vacation at the end of summer break – feels rather desperate and scarey knowing I’ll come back right into school, but hopefully that will inspire thorough recreation while I’m gone…
Summer is a unique refuge for teachers, one that feels vast at the beginning and so short towards the end. I always launch into vacation with a list of what I want to do, and often even keep a log of daily activities. This summer – my 7th “teacher refuge” – felt less like a project and more like a respite than any before. I chalk that up to my growing experience in the profession and a conscious choice to focus on the freedom this time. I know this school year will be harder in many ways as the budget cuts increase class size from the usual 25-35 to 43 students packed into my 36-seat room. We also have three new administrators whose styles and agendas are yet to be discovered – that adds to the edginess. And once again I am teaching a new magnet art history course instead of my familiar 12th grade version, which means relearning in advance of teaching each day’s images (this curriculum is what I studied first year of college back in the dark ages). So I decided to be like Scarlett this summer – “I can’t think about that right now, if I do I’ll go crazy…”
On a lighter note, Monday was my birthday and we had a nice day out in the desert with BJ - hot but with a cooling swim in her pool. And Tuesday Devon baked me a birthday cake! I’m off to a wedding shower this afternoon, and Tuesday I fly east, but more on that trip later 
