Happy Trails

Hi, everyone! Congratulations on finishing Art 110 and the Spring 2018 Semester @TheBeach!

Contents of this Post

1. Points Update
2. Final Leaderboard
3. Final Pix
4. Your Class Feedback
5. Keep in touch!

Final Points

All points are now up on BeachBoard. And I turned final grades in to Brotman Hall yesterday (Wednesday) so you should be able to see them on MyCSULB today (Thursday). (is it still called “MyCSULB”? Or just “csulb.okta”? 😛 With 1,000 points possible, here’s the final points distribution:

• 900 = A – 76 peeps
• 800 = B – 9 peeps
• 700 = C – 6 peeps
• 600 = D – 2 peeps
• 599 = F – 4 peeps

Class GPA = 3.56

Final Leaderboard

Congratulations to everyone, whatever letter you happened to wind up with, on being a part of our Art 110 adventure this semester. I hope it was useful. And relevant. And fun. And, yes, we did have a lot of A’s! 😀 What’s even awesomer than so many A’s? Peeps who scored over 1,000 points. 25 of you did that! Here’s our final list of over 1,000 point peeps for Spring 2018:

1. Julia Heitke, 1122
2. Brigette Carballo, 1105
3. Yuri Heo, 1097
4. Pnanary Om, 1085
5. Andrew Ayala, 1083
6. Yena Kang, 1067
7. Megan Anaya, 1065
8. Eileen Sepulveda, 1061
9. Milo Kadrlik-Petrarca, 1060
10. Greg Dellanini, 1056
11. Jessica Lopez, 1051
12. Silje Steinvik, 1050
13. Young Cho, 1046
14. Toan Nguyen, 1035
15. Lauren Michele De Los Reyes, 1035
16. Kimberly Gonzalez, 1035
17. Delaney McCombs, 1035
18. Jessica Martinez, 1033
19. Yunjong Noh, 1031
20. Cary Makiyama, 1030
21. Semaj Lewis, 1028
22. Katelyn Hanson, 1026
23. Alice Chen, 1008
24. Linda Esparza, 1007
25. Lauren Adams, 1001

The Final

We had 4 events at the final, and you did fantastic on all of them! Well, 5 events if you count the potluck! 😀

0. The Potluck

I’ve always thought it was kind of bizarre to go on a 4-month journey with a group of people, and then to have the final, capstone experience of that journey be to sit in silence in a room for 2 hours and pour words into a Green Book till your hand cramps. Words that you memorized last night. Words that you will forget tomorrow. It’s crazy! A true “final” can only be a party – can’t it???

Did you try Julia’s awesome guacamole? She included diced black olives – OMG – what a taste sensation!

1. Art Identification

Did you find the person who drew your favorite ID Card?

2. Concrete Poetry

3. Mashups & Remixes

4. Art Collecting

Your Class Feedback

It’s a little crazy to believe, but I’ve been teaching at The Beach for 13 years now! 😮 OMG, some of you were five when I taught this class for the first time! The class has evolved a lot over that time. In the beginning, it was just a lecture class and I’d talk for 75 minutes twice a week. I know that sounds unbearably boring, but my student eval scores were surprisingly high back then. I’ve tried many “experiments” over the years. Some successful. Some not so much. We’ve used clickers on and off over the years. Students usually love clickers, but I ultimately felt that they’re kind of a distraction and take us further away from core ideas about art. I tried bringing students to the SOA Galleries sort of unsuccessfully in the past, and then later worked out the current format which I think works fairly well. Over the years, your feedback has helped a lot.

There are 4 ways I get feedback from you:

1. Informal conversation – F2F or Online
2. RateMyProfessors.com – I have to admit, it’s painful to look at this website! Many students have told me to never look at it! 😛 The main problem with RMP is that even at it’s high point, only about 4% of the class would post there, so it’s kind of a skewed metric. Today even fewer peeps post and it’s close to 1%, so not very representative. Still, it’s important to realize that RMP is a case of culture going around bad laws. RMP is kind of inaccurate by definition. A potentially biased (positive or negative) sample of 1% is too small. The “official” university evaluations should be much more accurate since something like 80% of students fill them out. It’s just better data. But even though those evaluations are your work product, you aren’t allowed to see them. Seems like bad policy to me. Oh, FYI, I do post my eval scores here (on the big table, click the bottom tab “Glenn Zucman 2012-2017”)
3. Official University Evaluations – it sucks that you don’t get to see these results, but they’re still useful to me. They’ve definitely helped me focus the course to be more relevant. The only problem is, I don’t get to see these till the middle of the next semester. So it has some use value in the long run, but it specifically cannot help me design a better course for the next semester! 🙁
4. Optional EC Feedback – Week C1. I get to see this right away, and when I discover how much you hate Architecture or UI Design, I can either eliminate them from the class or try to redesign them in ways that might be easier or more relevant or possibly even funnerer.

Here are the totals from your feedback. I took all of your upvotes, subtracted all of your downvotes, and then each activity wound up with a score that might be a positive or negative number. Every activity was loved by someone. Every activity was hated by someone:

• Finger Painting +25 -1 = +24
• Plaster Casting +25 -5 = +20
• Graffiti Writing +19 -5 = +14
• Landscapes with a Corpse +11 -7 = +4
• Life Design +8 -5 = +3

• Environmental Portraits +2 -2 = 0

• Zines & Flip Books +3 -4 = -1
• Automatic Drawing +7 -11 = -4
• ePortfolio +5 -15 = -10
• A new flag for Los Angeles +3 -14 = -11
• Architecture & Urban Planning +4 -19 = -15
• User Interfaces +5 -21 = -16

By a lot, your top 3 were Finger Painting, Plaster Casting, and Graffiti Writing. Neither finger painting nor graffiti writing is exactly “traditional art,” but they both are painting, so you could say that you favor “traditional” art forms. Or it might be that you preferred “messy hands” sorts of projects. Your bottom 4 activities, ePortfolio, LA Flag, Architecture, and UI, are less traditional, but also not “messy hands” sorts of projects.

Your middle 5: Landscapes, Life Design, Environmental Portraits, Zines, Flip Books, and Auto Draw, are kind of all over the map. Automatic Drawing is “messy hands,” but perhaps too weird for many of you. I’m surprised Zines & Flipbooks did so poorly. Both photography activities wound up with mediocre scores.

Most semesters I try to retire the bottom 1 or 2 activities. I’m disappointed that UI came in dead last. It seems strange given that so many aspects of your daily reality revolve around UI. The ease of Instagram. The cool of Snapchat. I’ve been working with a health app called MyCircadianClock for a couple months now. I’m very interested in the health ideas the app embodies, but the UI is so tedious and annoying that I hate using it despite my interest.

You could argue that UI is the most relevant of all the activities. But clearly, your feedback says otherwise. Maybe it’s just a design space you don’t care about. Or maybe it could be interesting if I came up with a smarter way to do it. I’ll see if I can come up with a different approach to UI.

As you know, there were a couple of weeks where we had 2 activity choices and you got to pick one. In reading your comments about the various activities, I felt like we should have two choices every week so students will always have a choice. Some of you asked for a “my turn” activity where you make up your own activity. I’ve done that at various points in the past, and it seems like it’s time to bring that back.

Class Content

There wasn’t a real consensus on class content. Your feedback was all over the map. Some said that there was way too much Art History, that it was boring and annoying and, “if I’d wanted to learn Art History, I would have taken an Art History class.” Others said there needed to be more Art History, that it was hard to write about student artists when we’d had so little formal content about AH.

Group Projects / Meeting Classmates

For sure the single biggest shock in your feedback is that a number of you were unhappy with so many individual projects and wished the class would have focused more on group projects. Or more ways to meet and interact with classmates.

When I’ve tried to do group projects in the past, students hate them! It’s a constant stream of complaints about groups. I actually think that working in groups is very important, but I’ve stopped doing it because of so many student complaints.

As for meeting classmates, I thought we’d done a number of things this semester to help with that, but it seems that many of you didn’t think so. In the past, we’ve had “Classmate Conversations” where you interview a different classmate each week and do a small blog post about them. I think people liked those, but I recently ended them for 2 reasons: the first was just to have less weekly work to do, and the second was that requiring you to post about each other in a public space seemed problematic. The posts were all positive, but it still seemed like shaky ground.

Course Website & Using WordPress

The majority of you thought these were good and effective tools for us.

A-B-C Class Format

A few of you found the A-B-C format unnecessary and confusing. However, the majority thought it was a better format.

ID Cards

Many of you mentioned that you enjoyed making ID Cards. You thought they were fun & de-stressing.

Happy Trails

Keep in Touch

If you’d like to keep in touch, IRL, or URL, I’m not hard to find:

• IRL: USU / Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – M/W 1-2p
• IRL: SOA / Gallery Courtyard – Most M/W during weeks 4-13 (aka “B1-B10”) 3:30 – 4:45p
• URL: My Website
• URL: IG / metro_glenn
• URL: FB / Art110 Alumni

Thanks for a great semester, everyone! It was so nice getting to meet all of you and learn a tiny bit about your many different majors and your many different life paths. To the few of you that are graduating, congratulations! Good luck on the road ahead! To the big majority that will be back next year, good luck in the rest of your Long Beach State career. And to everyone, have a good summer! Get some rest. Earn a few dollars. Have some fun.