A month into the semester is a month closer to student teaching, and after some time management Tetris, I’ll get my schedule under control in a way that allows me regular visits to both of my placement schools. It’s time to really get to know them.

Circumstances recently kept me at home in Kentucky for just over a week, and two weeks later I was back again for a wedding. Whenever I am home I make point to drive past places and things—to inspect for change; to be relieved by the lack of change; to be completely taken aback by any change. When I tell people about where I grew up I want it all to still be true. According to the 2010 census, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky has a population of 8,207 (the population of just my neighborhood in Chicago is 56,521). Though, in the Wikipedia article it is noted that over 120,000 people are buried in Fort Mitchell’s three cemeteries. If we are going by Wikipedia, the two other most important things you need to know about where I have come from are that we have an annual 4^th of July Parade, and Beechwood—my school. In becoming a teacher it is impossible to not always be thinking about my school, with so much of my educational philosophy either rooted in my own education or in response to it.

Eight years removed, it seems like there is some sort of force field of physics around Beechwood, keeping it now as a hologram ghost that I can’t set foot on. I was there for eleven years. In just driving past and not getting close enough to investigate all of the phases of new construction, I only know Beechwood to be exactly as I left it. There is a lot to romanticize about a small K-12 school and its champion football team—a narrow tree-lined street with signs reading “WE BELIEVE” and “Tiger Country” in red letters in every front yard during playoffs, leading to the schoolyard toilet-papered by the senior class in keeping with tradition. Things were kept seemingly idyllic above the occasional small-town drama that could have been dropped right into the plot of Friday Night Lights. But, more than just football and being quaint, we were one of the best schools in the state academically. By time I graduated we were having pep rallies for everything: marching band, baseball, girls volleyball, state testing. We all rolled our eyes at the banner that went up in the cafeteria: Beechwood: Where Academics Soar, and Tigers Roar! There was something to it all, though, the sense of community that is inherent at such a small school—a thousand kids, K-12, assembled in the gym. As much as the magic may have been lost to me as a high school student, it is the kind of community I’d want to be part of as a teacher.

In playing my part as “the art girl” at a small school, I was more than ready to graduate. By the luck of Facebook it wasn’t going to be hard to keep track of my graduating class of under eighty students. I was going to go off into the world (to Chicago) to become a high school art teacher and right all of the wrongs of teenagers not appreciating art; there is more to this world than high school football, etc., etc. While some of that original motivation is still close to my heart, my reasoning in pursuing a career in art education has come to be more fully formed and informed. On approximately January 27th of 2015 I will begin the high school portion of my student teaching. And…yeah…I’m a bit apprehensive. I don’t exactly want to be a high school art teacher anymore, at least not yet. When I graduate from Columbia’s MAT program I will be licensed to teach art K-12 and I’m really eyeing K-8 at this point in my life. That is not to say that I’m not excited for the high school experience, it’s just that I have a lot to learn from it.

MAT candidates are required to log 120 observation hours before student teaching—this means going into classrooms and learning as much as you can about the environment, the class dynamics, teaching styles, learning styles, curriculum development, anything and everything you can learn from to bring into your own practice. Along the way there are assignments specific to courses to direct these experiences and your response to them. The whole process may also help form a relationship that can turn into your student teaching placement. I came into the program with a slight advantage of familiarity with Chicago Public schools as a volunteer with 826CHI, a nonprofit creative writing and tutoring center in Wicker Park, with which I have worked with students from likely a hundred schools and gone into classrooms at well over a dozen schools all over the city. There were a handful of schools I knew I wanted to visit for observations, and a few that sat high on my list in seeking out my placement schools.

This is a map marking twenty-five schools in Chicago that I have visited at some point either as an 826CHI volunteer over the past five years, or in logging observation hours over the past year and in working for Columbia’s Center For Community Arts Partnerships’ TEAM program. I’ve come to see what school is like in quite a few settings different from my quaint little K-12 school. No two schools in all of CPS are the same, and in preparing to teach in an urban environment it is important to get out and see the whole range.

7th graders at William P. Gray Elementary School working with TEAM.

I will be spending eight weeks of my student teaching practicum at Nicholas Senn High School in Edgewater (my neighborhood), followed by seven at Alexander Graham Bell Elementary School in the North Center neighborhood. Senn once held the Guiness Book record for the “Most Diverse” school in the United States. Bell was a school I had visited with 826CHI many times and in addition to being a neighborhood school it has programs for gifted students, and for those who are deaf or hearing impaired. There are a lot of schools in Chicago that I have come to love, but for the sake of my morning commute I wanted to keep my placements to the north side. My concept of Chicago’s geography was mostly formed by venturing out to different neighborhoods to volunteer, observe, and work at schools. While at home in Kentucky I was asked a couple of times if I like living in Chicago. After eight years it isn’t necessarily a matter of liking living here, but that it is home now—it is where I’ve been making my life. Grad school would have been an opportune time to move somewhere else if that had been what I wanted, but Chicago is where I want to teach. I’ve gotten to know this city through its students and its schools, and that is what has made Chicago home.

Bell School Art Room Community Mural