Students at Étude High School have the opportunity to choose between four humanities classes throughout their four years of schooling. The Issues and Ethics course delves into specific issues facing today’s world at large and encourages students to consider the ethical and moral implications in dealing with potential problems and issues on a global scale. This year’s Issues and Ethics class is participating in the University of Wisconsin - Madison’s Great World Text in Wisconsin program. Great World Text is a program for teachers and high school students across the state to study literature and history through the humanities lens.
This year the UW Center for the Humanities selected Kiss of the Spider Woman, a 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig about two political prisoners in the Dirty War that use movies to escape the realities of their confinement. While students studied the novel in the English portion of Issues and Ethics, they investigated the Dirty War, history of Argentina, and the political connections between Argentina and the United States in the Social Studies portion.
This Kiss of The Spider Woman project is a cartonera that tells about Argentina’s Dirty War tragedies through the lens of a children’s book. Cartoneras are a collection of art forms bound together with free, reusable materials like cardboard, that make social and political statements. This cartonera exposes the censorship of the public during the Dirty War. Étude Juniors Abby Coutts, Payton Damkot and Marie Grawein created a Cartonera focused on the kidnappings and missing people of the Dirty War, homosexual relationships (as an homage to Molina, main character of Kiss of the Spider Woman), and a dramatized version of how Argentina would look in the news media, with everything being censored and withheld.
“I really liked that the book was written in dialogue. I have never read a book like this one. The movies that Molina references and the scientific studies in the footnotes helped me understand the world that Molina and Valentin live in” (Coutts).
They wanted to portray the way the Argentinian government censored its people in an interesting way. For them, that meant taking the idea of “censorship” to an extreme, by making the Dirty War “child-friendly”. In their research, they read about Juan Peron and his wife Isabel Peron, and how under Peronism, the country of Argentina had to suffer through a lack of education in their school system. The Perons’ also heavily censored the news media, using their power to have anybody that opposed them fired, or worse. The images of the children’s book reveals this; however, when a blacklight is held to the pages, the realities of the Dirty War are revealed to the readers through graphic images and changes in language.
“My favorite part of this project was probably creating the front and back cover using the descriptions Puig provided in the novel. The back cover portrays the toxicity of the venomous Dirty War and the crimes committed against the people of Argentina” (Damkot).
Étude students participating in Great World Text will formally present their projects on March 9 at UW-Madison.
It's the end of November, which means that it's time once again to attend the Whitewater Creative Writing Festival. Étude has been attending the Festival for over a decade, but this was the first trip for most of our attending students this year. Fourteen 9th, 10th, and 11th graders hopped on the bus and spent the day on the UW-Whitewater campus, interacting with peers from across the Midwest, workshopping their writing, and learning from some of the finest writers in Wisconsin.
Subbing in a science class can be intimidating for a non-science teacher, but when the students have clear directions and are excited about their work, it’s easy! Today the Chemistry students worked in small groups to write short fictionalized stories about scientists who contributed to the atomic theory.
Joining the recent Lakeland College Community Book Read featuring Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! gave me a chance to dabble with text and blackout poetry, which I brought back for students to try. Gina Covelli, Community Relations Manager, and Jodie Liedke, Assistant Professor of Composition, shared copies of pages from the novel. We read through, then circled words that stood out. Blacking out all the rest with heavy strokes of Sharpie produced a poem that maybe reinterpreted the pages or maybe spoke to the reader about some other observation. It reminded me of finding the carving within a great block of old wood: you carve away until the subject is revealed. One of my students, Jackson, remarked that using pages of fiction was a much more rewarding experience for blackout poetry, the word choices so much more beautiful than those of nonfiction articles.
IDEAS Academy students traveled to the UW-Whitewater High School Creative Writing Festival on November 18. Twenty-five students and two teachers attended the event, with 17 students submitting work to be critiqued by college professors, professional writers and peers, and the others coming along as support for friends and to hear other presenters. In addition to entering creative writing, two students created mixed media pieces to be shown at the festival.
In her foreword to Caroline Sharp’s The Writer’s Workbook: Daily Exercises for the Writing Life, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts the following conversation with a friend:
IDEAS and Mosaic artists were featured alongside other literary professionals in a local 100 Thousand Poets for Change event at Mead Library on September 28.
In place of formal written finals, IDEAS Academy students present their semester long project twice a year in a public venue.
When 100 Thousand Poets for Change presented at the Mead Public Library on Saturday, Sept. 29, the IDEAS Academy students were already prepared.
Seven IDEAS Academy students attended the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater High School Creative Writing Festival Wednesday, November 16.
Building something new is what makes us thrive! So creating a school has been continuously exciting and rewarding.
Today in the TimeSlips Seminar (this is a project we’re working on with JMKAC’s Connecting Communities) we enjoyed a visit from Tracy Cinealis, CSA, of Libby’s...
Poetry & Lyrics Seminar wrapped up its quarter today with a “Final Reading” in three categories: Poetry Out Loud (inspired by the National Endowment for the...