Why Did Ms. M become an art teacher?

 For a classroom assignment, we needed to ask Ms. M why she chose to be an art teacher. Like many others, she was inspired by her high school art teacher. She thought that her art teacher had an amazing job and knew that she could do it too. She enrolled her freshman year as an art education student and never looked back! She mentioned that right out of college it was much harder to be an art teacher because everything was still so new. She had to think about everything for much longer and plan things out much more in depth because she did not have the knowledge that comes with years of experience. Ms. M was very motivational when she told us that it gets much easier!

The only drawback that Ms. M made us aware of it that although she gets her creative outlet by working with the children daily, she does not have much time (or really much motivation) to create her own art work. When she gets home after a day of school, she is either working on a new project for the students, or using her time to spend with her family and live her life as well! As she was speaking with us, she made sure to tell us that this is not necessarily a huge draw back at all. She loves working with the children and enjoys watching their minds work (That is one of the things that I love about this pre-teaching experience as well!) The thought, "What if I do this....?" is always so fun to read on childrens' faces.

As a follow up question, we asked what parts of the profession have changed in her years as an art teacher. She was immediately answering us back when she described how we have to prove ourselves as art teachers in order to be considered a worth-while class. This is most likely due to the changes in the curriculum as well as to the lack of money that schools are receiving. In order to prove herself, she found that she has more busy work in order to truly write everything down and make sure to show what objectives the students are learning and how she is tying her classroom projects into other classroom subjects.

Ms. M finds herself working on project samples for class instead of her own work.

A very notable point that Ms. M made was that creativity is also a life lesson that many children need to learn. If they don't learn it early on, how are they going to differentiate themselves from their competition in the real world? It is the creative mind that sets many "geniuses" apart from others. Creativity is a life skill and must be taught to the children at some point, so why not earlier?