Alice Jones
Food Columnist
Over the next six weeks students and teacher chaperones will be traveling as far east as Venice, Italy for enrichment trips that plan to take learning to the streets.
The 26 girls venturing across the Atlantic Ocean to Venice are arriving today and staying until Feb. 23 in the San Marco quarter of the city. The first three days will focus on completing an art and architecture treasure hunt that will take the girls from the galleries of Castello, Miracoli to the Accademia. Each location has its own list of pieces and paintings the students must find.
“This takes the girls out of the classroom and lets them see and experience the art first hand,” art history teacher Sonia Evers said. “They get to use their eyes and learn by looking for the artist and art pieces that we have studied in class on the streets of Venice.”
Along with scouring streets and visiting museums, the group will stop by the Church of San Sebastiano, the cathedral Evers wrote about in her doctoral dissertation. The girls will hear the monks’ choir and observe the 16th-century frescoes lining the altar walls.
The students will also attend a performance of “La Boheme” at La Fenice.
“I am very excited to be seeing ‘La Boheme,’” junior Scarlett Cinotti, who sings for the San Francisco Girls Chorus and is a fan of classical music, said. “To watch and appreciate beautiful Italian opera in this gorgeous ancient city, is so wonderfully authentic — an experience I would never have had otherwise.”
Art department chair Rachel McIntire and math teacher Miriam Symonds plan to bring a group of students to New York City March 31 to April 4 for an interdisciplinary trip focusing on art, math and architecture around the city.
“Students will be using their smart phones to take photos and document the city’s art and architecture, incorporating the interdisciplinary of art and math with a photography element,” Symonds said.
The opening of the Museum of Mathematics, the only math museum in the United States, inspired Symonds to organize a trip and decided to involve an art aspect as well. As students meander through the city, they will be “Mapping the Metropolis,” recording architecture they find interesting or innovative.
“This trip really caught my interest,” senior Claudia Tropp said. “I’m able to us my love of photography to help document our math and art experiences in museums and what we find along the city.”
The 14 students will also go on the “official” Gangs of New York tour. Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s film, the tour will take the group through neighborhoods with former gang hangouts like Chinatown and the Financial District then stop at Paradise Square and sites associated with the 1857 Police and 1863 Draft Riots.
“I am hoping that along with enjoying the city, the girls will learn to see the connection of math in the real world and not just in the classroom,” Symonds said.
