the classroom makeover

here are the promised pictures of the finished classroom mural project!
in case you forgot what my classroom looked like, let me give you the 'before' pictures first...

i had all my classes paint this particular mural as a project at the end of my first year teaching here.

lovely rolling hills, pleasant, colorfully peaceful...

any time we've discussed what could be painted next, the only enthusiastic idea i ever heard was to take gallons of paint and throw them wildly at the walls, creating a mass mayhem of colorfulness. while that idea appealed to the creative side of me, it definitely did not appeal to the neat-freak, organized, structured side of me.
so i came up with this compromise -- a mural of people looking like they're throwing paint at the walls and each other while they're at it.
somehow it ended up looking vaguely like a hippie van which doesn't help my frequent assertion that i do NOT, in fact, smoke pot. somehow being the art teacher comes with some unfortunate assumptions :-)

one student came in shortly after getting started with the painting and said, 'oh great, rainbows and black people, what are we trying to say here?'
while i love gay people and any/every race just as much as the next guy, i promise this wasn't a political statement!
although that would be more in keeping with the history of mural painting as a whole. today i'm having them do a little worksheet on murals and diego rivera. they're going to be thrilled. they'll wish we were still painting.


we cast shadows of different students on the walls and traced around them... this one is me, looking powerful and super-hero-esque.


it was fun while it lasted. praise god it's over. i can now recover from my stress-induced zits in peace.