Everything had been set up so carefully for the visiting artist’s residency. |
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Has it really only been two weeks since she arrived? |
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Marian Roth has been helping fourth, sixth and seventh graders make their own pinhole cameras. |
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In a darkroom, students put light-sensitive paper into a can and seal it up tight. |
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Then they take it outside and expose the paper to light by opening a small hole for a few seconds. |
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Then it’s back to the darkroom, where the paper is processed to make a print. |
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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. |
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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. |
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There was an entirely different kind of photo shoot in the Middle School on Monday. |
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Channel 10 came by to do a feature on a Gordon eighth grader. |
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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. |
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On Thursday, this same eighth grader was preparing alongside his classmates for a more low key performance. |
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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. |
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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). |
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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. |
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Upon their return, each student creates a scrapbook, which then becomes the source for what they read at Voices of the South. |
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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. |
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“I know you can be louder than that!” says the teacher as one student reads from her “What Next?” |
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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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