Welcome Seniors to Their Second Year of IB Art

IB Art 2019!

This year, eleven seniors have started their IB Art journey. They are now working in the new art studio next to Ms. Mora’s room. All of the seniors in the class chose to take the high-level course, which requires the students to complete eight to twelve art pieces and a few written assignments by March 2019. Even though these seniors worked their best to reach the requirement, many difficulties have followed. The biggest difficulties were completing their written assignment and art pieces at the same time. There are two written assignments to be graded. The first one is a comparison study, and it requires the students to compare two different art pieces from a cultural and historical perspective. The other one is Process Portfolio, which makes you create a powerpoint with all the process of making the art pieces. The CS weighs 20% of the grade, and PP weighs 40% in total. These written assignments were to test the student’s understanding of art as well as their analytical skills.

What Do Seniors Say About IB Art?

Tanya K., an outstanding student of the class, expressed her excitement toward this course.  She is enjoying the class and looking forward to the senior art exhibition which takes place in  March 2019. She said, “We finally get to move to the other classroom in which we have our own workspaces and we’re going to have our exhibition in March 2019 which is exciting.” Unlike the students behind the schedule, Tanya completed three art pieces by the end of her junior year. She devoted “3 to 4.5 hours a week”, including her weekend to reach the severe requirements of this course. Her biggest concern at this moment is the written assignment, she said: “I’m worried about the written assignments because I’m not sure whether I’m doing it right or not”. Regardless of these concerns, Tanya is aiming for a high 6 or 7 as her final grade.

Claudia L., the member of the IB Art, expressed a slightly different perspective than Tanya. She couldn’t fully enjoy her class due to several reasons. The major difficulties are time management and productivity,  she said ” Although I enjoy art very much, I think that we have not been doing much in class this year. I expected us to start on something cool right away or begin our projects but because we have all been procrastinating and not handing in our work on time, the class is now behind the schedule”. Not only that, the upcoming exhibition seems to stress her a lot. Although there are difficulties with the class, Claudia does not regret her decision over this course. She said “A lot of people don’t think that art is important because they believe that it won’t help them earn money in the future but we need art for a lot of things. For example, we need it for designing the model of a phone or for advertising a product”. Her biggest concern about this course is to complete 8 pieces to 12 pieces of artwork by the end of February 2019. To accomplish her goal, she is planning to visit artroom both during lunchtime and after school.

Dylan C., the only male in the class, has indicated his thoughts as well. He enjoys working and collaborating with his classmates in the creative atmosphere. It allows him to produce better art pieces. In fact, his biggest concern is meeting the deadlines of each project. He said, “The written assignments are just as challenging as creating the art pieces, usually the simpler the piece, the harder the writing [assigment] will be.” Regardless of his passion for art, he chose to study for business at the university. He said, “I have great passion in both business n art. But since business is more of a stable option for livelihood, I’m choosing business over art. Though I’ll still continue to work on art in my spare time”.

Are You Considering to Take IB Art? Read some tips that the seniors give you:

Surprisingly, none of the above seniors are planning to major in art. Still, they chose this course because they knew how important the art is to our community.

According to the current seniors, it is important to be productive to survive in this course. To be productive, the students should learn to plan ahead of time, and use their time more efficiently.