Screened Dreams & Temporary Seams

D.B / 2021 / ORIENTATION AP

Introduction

    What makes a student at GCE? How about a teacher? Along with other required strange questions to answer on an action project for orientation. Welcome to GCE's expectation guide for students and teachers, compiled by students and only students. Keep in mind this isn't too essential to the primary piece of this action project, as it is actually just re-sorting a room and detailing its blueprints onto why we decided to go and organize a room in that particular manner. We will once again get to that later.

Our Expectations

As students, our expectations from teachers are often peculiar and never truly written in stone for all to follow. Nor are the expectations for students the same for teachers. Everyone's approach on a piece is different, and it will forever remain that way as long as we're not all bundled up nice and cozy together living the same lives. There are of course general rules that we all morally should feel obligated to follow, be it teacher or student.

After a short discussion, we rounded up a general idea of what we wanted our school environment to be, particularly what we wanted our two roles in the school to be. Teachers and students. Below you'll find two lists compiled of expectations set for both by students. 

Students are expected to be: Kind, motivated, focused, interested, does work, cares, participates, mutual respect, curious, works timely, and last but not least not a distraction to their fellow peers.

Once again, it is very vague onto its ruling but is one nonetheless. There isn't too much to say on this as I have agreed to this "contract" of student behavior, so I'm bound to it in a way. Maybe not legally. Who knows.

Teachers are expected to be: Empathetic, caring, organized, interested, entertaining, understanding, flexible, patient, open to doing one on one's with students, and lastly excited to teach. 

My primary takeaway from this is mostly the "excited to teach" portion. Teachers at GCE are quite fascinated with what they teach, very passionate about the topics taught and the results that come from it. As stubborn as I can be, not a single teacher here has lacked a passion to teach their topic. 

The Actual Action Project

Now that we're finally here, let's get a little more into the action project. If you had read my orientation field experience reflection, you would know that I am assigned to a theatrical room of sorts for this action project and I had originally designed the room to fit the general theme of that trip over to Millennium park. To summarize what this action project is quite simply the teachers wanting us to fix up the rooms for them with what little we have to work with and a very unspecified budget. At this point in time, we are in the old building by the North/Clybourn stop on the red line. They still do not have the new building and they've also moved out quite a lot of the stuff we used to have in this building over to the new one. 

Now that you know what situation us students are in, I shall now finally present to you what we had in mind for the theatre room we have here. There's probably an official name for it, but considering I can't remember it and theatre room fits a lot better, we are settling on that. Firstly let's go over what is in the room currently. There are 8 pews (yes pews, as in the church benches) each currently able to fit two students each due to COVID restrictions (via duct tape restricting the middle to sit on). Luckily for us, that doesn't require any extra seats as our biggest class is about fourteen students. We have a total of 5 outlets, so the room is pretty useful utility-wise and nobody usually is fighting over an outlet to charge their devices. Other than that, it's all we have.

We decided to list off the cons of this room to figure out what we needed in it based on the classes that were going to be taught in here during our 2 months here, which would be a journalism class, a stories class, and a math class.

CONS LIST: 

- The pews are horrible to write on, it is one of the worst rooms for note-taking.

SOLUTION: Large clipboards that we're ordering cheap from somewhere, original plan was to buy little TV tray desks for students since they're cheap and temporary. Sadly they're $10, and that'd be $140 just for two classes to be able to write notes, so we worked around it with something significantly cheaper and cut it down to something like $30 in total with the large clipboards.

- There is absolutely nowhere to write mathematics in this room.

SOLUTION: Big, big, whiteboard on the wall. 

- No projector or projector screen

SOLUTION: Arguing with another class why the theatre room needs a projector more than a room that has a flat screen TV already in it, and unscrewing a projector screen from another room.

- No sound pads? 

SOLUTION: We're hopefully buying sound pads for the space?

Finally, here's the blueprint and some pictures of what our space is supposed to look like, along with some sources for where we'll be buying the two things we need.

Photos taken by me.

Conclusion

Our priority as a group was established, which was to hone in on the weaknesses of the space that didn't appeal to the classes that would be taught in this room. Did we establish that? I feel as though we did and if we didn't, then I believe time will only tell. Thank you for reading.