Ceramics

The teacher [Ridder] is supportive of students' creativity and is hopeful that they will be creative in as many projects as possible. Even though many of the projects have to do with emulating texture, the students can still find a way to be creative and work at a good pace with her help. She offers help if she passes by and notices that someone is a bit confused, and there's an assistant teacher who also helps out the most that she can from what she knows about the projects. At the beginning of the semester when I drew on my hand with a black marker, I noticed that it got stuck to the clay and caused a black smudge to form. I sprayed it with water and it wasn't as visible, but the teacher was confused as to why the smudge appeared and when I showed her my hand she laughed about it because she does the same thing sometimes when she's at home. She didn't want to stress me out about staining the clay, but she told me to avoid drawing on my hand during that schedule even though the marker is washable since the ink can get in the clay.

Photography

The teacher [Kornfeld] tries her best to help out any students who need it, going around the classroom and asking if anyone needs help occasionally. She is a friendly person and compliments her students photos for their projects as she finds them to be fascinating. She has to deal with obnoxious freshmen sometimes unfortunately, but tries her best to help them and stop them from disrupting the class occasionally as they sometimes cause distractions or fail to follow her rules [not eating while she lectures, talking to each other while she's talking, etc.]. She's relatively fair with grading but if your work is late starting with the first at-home project [Portrait], she will give only half credit unless the excuse is valid.

Communications

The professor [Gend] is a welcoming and funny professor, and he tries to create a friendly environment for everyone by giving them a chance to be introduced to other students as well as introducing the class structure and policy in a way that isn't overwhelming. He also is friendly and relates well to the students. There are some students that mention games they like and he'll talk to them about it and often relate to some of the student's frustrations about the game [like the game developers not publishing the release of the next game for such a long time, like with GTA VI for instance]. He also says things that I find to be kind of funny, like with RDR2 when he sighed and said "that game took years off of my life..." and recommended me to play it since I was thinking about purchasing it with how much he talked about it [plus, my sister's friend likes the game as well]. When I bought it, I was listing off what games I bought, saying, "Cyberpunk, Detroit: Become Human, and Red Dead 2." The moment I said the last one, he looked overjoyed and said "that's the one I was waiting for!" because he knows I was planning to buy it. It was actually pretty cool to have a lot of students that don't ridicule you for liking certain games and actually being supportive and relating to it. He said that he's unfortunately been told he looks like Ed Sheeran [some students could see it, I couldn't really] but I think he looks similar to Brody from Life Is Strange 2 [aside from the fact that his hair is red and not light brown, and his eye color is different]. He likes to see what students think he looks like [if he looks similar to a character or person], but I forgot to tell him he looks similar to Brody [my bad]. I think it's the fact that he creates a welcoming environment is what motivated me to make speeches without being overwhelmed or riddled with anxiety. This helped other students as well. We were all meant to have groups as well, and my group in the class was also friendly and welcomed my speech ideas.