Colorado Teachers Tour with The Grateful Dead!

  My apologies to all true Deadheads.

So we are not really touring with the Grateful Dead, but the display at the New York Historical Society was cool and I now own a Grateful Dead t-shirt.  We began our day at the second oldest museum in the country, the New York Historical Society.  They have a great collection, too bad it was undergoing extensive renovation.  We did to see some of it and it is impressive.  

     The nice thing about today was it was pretty low-key and totally teacher oriented.  The activities planned by our facilitators (Mia and Richard) were hands-on and totally student oriented.  Richard was a little too quick for our group.  He was half-way through describing each item before our entire group got there.  Before we could get it figured out he was on the move again.  There is a good lesson there for teachers; if you don’t want to lose the group, be sure they all get to play.

  

     I really liked Mia’s statement, “observe don’t interpret.”  You cannot interpret it if you do not take the time to see what is there.  When using primary sources we sometimes want to jump right to the interpretation and we do not take the time to actually look for detail in the source.  I can see this being especially true of paintings and other artifacts (I am not entirely excluding documents here).  Her example was the commode chair.  She walked us through step by step:  what do you see? What else do you notice? And in good teacher style she took everyone’s answers and responded with, “excellent” or “nice” or some other comment of affirmation.  I also liked her statement that artifacts are living and every time someone looks at an artifact they pull something different from it.  That is the beauty of using primary sources and especially artifacts like objects and paintings in class; students will see things we have never seen before.  Teacher note – on some assignments that I have kids find primary sources, I out special emphasis on finding things I have not seen before.  You can give extra credit if you like, but the idea is two-fold.  First, students will look a little deeper and secondly, it will increase your file of primary sources.

     In the second part of the session we focused on New York during the Civil War.  I guess I never realized how pro-South NYC was.  The tie to cotton was greater than I had understood it to be.  The jigsaw activity about Jacob Ellis was one I can take right into the classroom.  The style of the activity can easily be adapted to other sets of documents.  Free notebooks full of activities are always welcome.  The activity was a great mix; audio clips, primary sources, writing questions on the paper, displaying the paper in specific order, explaining your paper, and then summarizing the story.  It was good teacher stuff or pedagogy if you want.  The NYHS is a great resource for ideas and sources.

  

     Following lunch at the over-rated Shake Shack we headed for the Museum of Natural History.  It is a great museum, but alas not enough time and too many middle schoolers shortened our stay.  The museum had excellent displays.  I am always fascinated walking through great museums.  Great museums have a way of pulling you in.  I found myself looking for the Night at the Museum displays.  I think museums are great places for students to be.  In many cases it is simply the exposure that they need – let them find something cool and run with it (well, not literally run with it).

     We finished the day with another unique adventure, our trip to Yankee Stadium.  Thanks to Donna, we had great seats.  I am not a Yankees fan, but as a baseball fan I enjoyed the experience.  Trivia question for anyone that knows: How many people can possibly crowd into a New York City subway car on the way to or from a Yankees game?

Oh yea, Yankees win and she said yes.  If you were there you understand.

  

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