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Cameras and reflections

This Week at Gordon: April 14 2005

 

Everything had been set up so carefully for the visiting artist’s residency.
 
Has it really only been two weeks since she arrived?
 
Marian Roth has been helping fourth, sixth and seventh graders make their own pinhole cameras.
 
In a darkroom, students put light-sensitive paper into a can and seal it up tight.
 
Then they take it outside and expose the paper to light by opening a small hole for a few seconds.
 
Then it’s back to the darkroom, where the paper is processed to make a print.
 
The curve of the can and the imperfections of the hole make the resulting images unpredictable. The prints-which come out as negatives-are eerie and fascinating.
 
In these classes, the power of hands-on work is obvious. When it’s handmade, a tiny, inverted, grainy, fuzzy black-and-white eyes-closed portrait is so much more rewarding than the sharpest shot that any color printer could spit out.
 
There was an entirely different kind of photo shoot in the Middle School on Monday.
 
Channel 10 came by to do a feature on a Gordon eighth grader.
 
This young man has been the Rhode Island champion in the National Geographic Geography Bee for the past three years. His Bee experience – which took him to national television one year, to be quizzed by none other than Alex Trebek – has given him poise and grace under pressure that will serve him well long after he has forgotten the details of Madagascar’s top three exports.
 
On Thursday, this same eighth grader was preparing alongside his classmates for a more low key performance.
 
It was the rehearsal for Voices of the South, an annual event where eighth graders share their reflections on their trip to Georgia and Alabama.
 
Each year, the trip follows a similar itinerary, but each student brings his or her own perspective to the experience (to read about last year’s trip, see This Week at Gordon: March 4th, 2004).
 
On the trip, students meet people who participated in the civil rights movement, and they begin to see that world-changing historical movements are fueled by the work of ordinary citizens.
 
Upon their return, each student creates a scrapbook, which then becomes the source for what they read at Voices of the South.
 
The last section of each scrapbook is titled “What Next?” There, students explain how they will use what they have learned to help bring positive changes in their own community.
 
“I know you can be louder than that!” says the teacher as one student reads from her “What Next?”
 
This is not just stagecraft she"s teaching, either. “This is important stuff you’re saying, and I want to hear you! You’re telling us how you are going to change the world!”
 
 

 

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