Honest and emotional. We caught up with Karen Anagnost, Graphic & Advertising Designer and CTE Teacher at J.F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, CA.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
In regards to my teaching career, probably my proudest accomplishment is that I survived my first year in the classroom, and stuck with it. No kidding here. Before beginning my job as a full-time art teacher, I worked as a graphic designer. My days were busy and I was always juggling multiple tasks. The environments I worked in were largely quiet and focused, which suited me well. My not-so-quiet teaching day is akin to a busy subway
station; bell rings, door opens, one group out, the next group in, hour after hour, 5 days a week, with lots of noise and chaos that I absorb and need to manage, handle and accept. With all that action comes lesson planning, teaching my content (graphic design), classroom management, knowing my students’ needs/strengths/improvement areas, handling discipline issues, handling student mental issues, communicating with parents, administrators, counselors, filling out grant applications for my classroom equipment funding, inspiring, engaging, and on and on!
I made it through my first year, and didn’t run for the hills. I learned how much of a bad-ass, not gonna give-up, gonna solve it, type of worker I truly am.
What is one thing a student taught you?
Wherever you are Noah, this one’s for you.
Two years into the most challenging and demanding work I had ever done, I was still struggling to find a way to keep many students on task, cooperating and not using my computer lab to Google naughtiness. In rolled 2014, and with it came a new group of thirty-one 10th graders that were mostly boys. Six of the boys were part of our very extroverted and energetic baseball team. It was almost a daily task to get that bonded bro squad to be on task and quiet down. We had a very good relationship, but I was exhausted, so I started to throw down some consequences. I made a phone call to one mother who was very involved in her kid’s education and told her I was having issues with her son. She handled him with consequences and the student was not happy with me at all. Unintentionally, I broke the trust that I had built with him. He told me that he thought we were close and that he wished I had talked to him before calling home. Rookie error on my part, but I learned that I needed to take a BIG breath, trust my students, and keep doing the hard work of learning to communicate better.
What is the best way students learn?
Students learn best the way we all learn best, with information that is broken into smaller chunks and delivered in different modalities (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) in an engaging fashion. Since my classroom is computer based, I create activities to get students up and out of their seats (kinesthetic activity). I use a popular game-based learning platform to quiz students on the instructions that they ignore more than read (visual and kinesthetic).