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Third Week 9/11 - 9/13:

The class is deciding their movies that they want to try and flip but almost all the students are not motivated. To do anything so there is nothing I could help them with if they don’t have the motivation to do things themselves.

 

Fourth Week 9/18 - 9/20:

In order to help the class be inspired, David and I decided that it would be interesting to have both of us also do the project to help the class and also provide an example. I thought that this was a great idea to help out the class, when I heard this I immediately started thinking of which movie I wanted to do.

 

Fifth Week 9/25 - 9/27:

While David and I were trying to do the flip a genre project one thing we realized while doing this is that it is taking longer than we initially thought. The reason it was taking so long was because we had to analyze the movie for certain parts that we need, finding the right dialogue in order to flip the genre. Overall very time consuming and a hard project to do. Also I fear that we’ve lost the interest of the students in the class even more since we were not doing any actual filming and the project was taking too long.

 

Sixth Week 10/2 - 10/4:

Students were still editing their trailers, however, we had an edit critique this week. A lot fo the students' trailers were actually coming together pretty well. Everyone had their own unique take on things and it was pretty uplifting to see that these people can actually come up with something of their own even though they showed little interest in the process.

 

Seventh Week: 10/9 - 10/11:

In class this week I actually encountered something I didn’t think I would come across while being a TA. As a TA one of my jobs was to look over the students work and give them feedback on little things they can improve on that will overall help their project. One of the students gave both David and me an attitude and being completely disrespectful. I didn’t know how to treat the situation for as I was getting furious inside and I wanted to yell at them very badly, but I was able to hold myself together keep calm for the most part until he started refusing and talking badly to me. Which at that point I could not handle him anymore so I got up, walked away to take a little breather and calm myself down.  Not everything is going to go your way but you got to do what you can to control what you can in the situation.

The more that these students show disinterest in film and also disrespect me really demotivates me from wanting to give them the help to better their films artistically and make me only want to give them the essentials to pass.

 

Eighth Week 10/16 - 10/18:

The class is progressing in the edit of their trailers, and at this point, it is all up to them to come up with the edit. Which is going to take a while especially for novice editors. I tried helping people with some editing short cuts to help speed up their workflow, but other than that I just viewed other people’s work and its coming along pretty okay.

 

Nineth Week 10/23 - 10/25:

Were still getting through with our edits. David and I have been growing tired of this unit and really just want them to start moving on to the next thing. We also had a talk about what the next unit should be. I suggested that we start diving in to an experimental video unit, because I remember how fun making experimental films were at CalArts, and I thought it would be a nice break from just staring at the computer all day and David seems pretty on board with it.

 

Tenth Week 10/30 - 11/1:

Apparently, my idea for the experimental unit was shut down. David talked to a film production teacher at Encinal and he said that it would probably be best to do experimental video at the end of the year since it requires people to know the basics of filmmaking first in order to break it. However, I was furious inside because I really was pumped to teach people about there are so many different ways to make films and it is not all just set in stone. But the teacher at Encinal did have a good point about learning the basics so I guess it would be for the best.

 

Eleventh Week 11/13 - 11/15:

We finally screened the movie trailers that people made, and I got to say the students were there were some interesting takes on some well known films that I know. For example what if Meet The Robinsons was actually a horror movie instead of a coming of age film. Or an anime film Kiki’s Delivery Service as a romcom. Overall I am really impressed that the students were able to be this creative despite how well the trailers were executed.

 

Twelveth Week 11/27 - 11/29:

Now that the trailers are done the class is finally moving on to a new unit. David had set plans for the following weeks to just cover basics about storytelling techniques such as The Hero’s Journey as well as production techniques like controlling lighting in a scene to contribute to a mood of a film, or just basic composition rules, and the settings on a camera. While this would be going on, I would just add in to anything that he may miss or just apply my two cents of knowledge in film and help guide some lessons a little bit.

 

Thirteenth Week 12/4 - 12/6

The first week of these film basics have started and I could tell from the class that they were not at all interested. While David was lecturing and since we are such a small class of five people. I could see by the looks on peoples faces that they were all completely checked out. Which has been a huge bummer for both me and David because for me I really love film and I want to help out people who are also passionate about it as well, but when no one in the class really cares and is just taking the class to fulfil a requirement its really upsetting and can get boring. From their attitude of not caring can rub off on to the surrounding people as well as me. From these behaviours of the students, they make me not want to care about helping them if they don't care about it themselves.

 

Fourteenth Week 12/11 - 12/13:

As we're about to head off into break and next week with having only half day classes. David and I meet up one more time to talk about plans for how to hype up the class but it is really hard to think of ways to make people care about something that they just don’t really want to do. David intentionally made projects and little lessons lots of points so that way kids can pay attention, however, this had the opposite effect of what we wanted and ended up making most of the kids in the period doing worse in the class. I have never been in a situation like this where I would have to try to strategize plans to make people care about something or even think of lesson plans on how to change the curriculum to appeal more to the students.  I thought of the idea of instead of the class being about “telling real stories and becoming true storytellers” why not have it be a class more about experimentation and just discovery of video and not have things be as serious. But in the end we would just need to think it over. For now we just continued to finish up the basic filmmaking lessons.

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Closing Statement

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Being a Teacher Assistant was a much different experience from what I thought it would be. From this internship, I feel that I learned a lot about what it means to be a leader and what it takes to be in charge of students from the perspective of a teacher. During the internship, I had to use communication skills to effectively express my ideas for the class structure to a wider audience, as well as teach specific video editing and shooting skills to a variety of students. I always communicated with my teacher about how we can change the curriculum of the class and make it better as the year went on. I also had to assist in teaching workshops about basic composition rules and different styles of storytelling.  At first, I thought that from doing this internship it would be easy and a walk in the park since it was for a film production class and I had a love for the craft of filmmaking and the process. But the class did not turn out to be the way I thought it would be. Both David, the film teacher, and I could not have seen how the roaster for the class could end up the way it did. The period I ended up TAing for was a group of five students who were not even the slightest bit interested or passionate about film. They all just took the class to get an art requirement. David and I were upset by this but we put up with it anyways. It was definitely a challenge trying to teach people who don’t care about a subject and trying to get other people interested in something that you are interested in, but in little ways I feel that I was successful when it came down to giving people feedback on how they can improve their work in a creative way, and they seemed to be influenced by my critiques because that is when they started to like editing a little more. Of course, there were times when I was not treated that well by the students, but part of being a teacher assistant is learning how to deal with situations like this and not get mad at the student, but rather calm them down and redirect them and be a leader and lead them to success.

From this experience, I learned that being a teacher is a lot harder than it looks, because of the time and effort you have to put into it besides the hours that school is in operation. The teacher has to design worksheets, lesson plans, and figure out how they are going to present an assignment or project to the class. As well as learning how to deal with troubled students. In the future as much as the idea of spreading knowledge of something you love wholeheartedly sounds great. I learned that from my own behaviour that maybe teaching is a job that I should stay far away from if I can’t learn how to accommodate to students who are disrespectful as well as learn how to prepare a lesson plan every week. This kind of work is not something for me, and I should just stick to actually making films rather than try to teach it.