School news
“Destruction of the Basket Tree”
This year Advanced Art & AP Art have worked closely with Vera Sheehan, an Abenaki artist, educator, and member of the Vermont Abenaki Artists Association. The students spent time in conversation with her, learning about the Abenaki culture as well as how Abenaki people are connected to the ash tree and affected by the presence of the emerald ash borer. The beautiful artwork they designed and created is in response to these conversations. Their work will be displayed in the education barn at St Gauden's National Historical Park in Cornish, NH, through July.
Congratulations to these student artists: Lindsey Bacon, Annie Hauze, Daphne McDermott, Myra McNaughton, Delia Morgan, Dillon Moss, Kiara Nestler, Charlotte Nunan, Jacob Stone, Logan Sudol, Allie Tarleton, Kyra Tartleton, Joseph Tsouknakis, Ariana Winawer-Stein, Kamron Yuengling.
8th grade students explore artificial intelligence
As artificial Intelligence becomes a routine presence in our lives, 8th grade English students have begun investigating how AI creates and sorts natural human language. Students began by looking at artificial intelligence broadly, and took a homemade Turing Test to see whether they could tell the difference between human and AI artists, musicians, and writers. Then we took a deep dive into StoryQ, an AI text classification model that took us behind the scenes to see how a machine "reads" human text, identifies key words, and assigns them negative or positive weights to make predictions about the overall sentiment, or tone.
Students fed StoryQ ice cream reviews, then analyzed the words the machine used to make its predictions about sentiment. Some of the machine's decisions surprised us. For instance, it assigned a heavy negative weight to "like" and "just," which were sometimes used positively. It was also flummoxed by sarcasm :). At first, StoryQ was only able to predict 78% of reviews accurately, so we analyzed error cases and proposed new language rules to improve the model.
Once we understood more about how AI generates and classifies text, we turned our attention to its limitations and its role in our lives. We looked at news stories and discussed whether AI is sentient, and whether it will ultimately improve or worsen human communication, and human life. Students raised concerns from disinformation to job loss. Below is an AI-generated image of 8th graders having a fishbowl-style discussion, courtesy of DALLE-2, and an actual image of our class doing the same thing.
Students present at VT Superintendent Association Conference
A group of students presented with Jennifer Stainton and Audrey Richardson at the Vermont Superintendent Association conference last Friday. They presented on Unity and Freedom: District Equity work through student voice.
Villalobos Brothers & Marek Bennett share life experiences
On Tuesday, May 24 our culminating events for our The Most Costly Journey took place in the library, classrooms and outdoors. The day began with The Villalobos Brothers visiting Maestra Megyesi's middle school Spanish class. The Villalobos Brothers told the students about their own journey from Mexico to the United States, how they studied music and the arts as kids and how those experiences shaped their careers as professional musicians today. Students asked them a lot of questions in Spanish about their instruments, their style of music and their favorite foods.
The next workshop middle school art students participated in was with Marek Bennett, cartoonist and one of the editors of The Most Costly Journey. Marek explained his process and taught the students in Ms. Jimerson and Ms. Piana's classes how to make their own comic books.
The main event was the concert by the Villalobos Brothers outside in the bowl behind the school. The brothers' exquisite musicianship, high-powered fiddling and moving vocals got the crowd clapping, dancing and singing along. In between songs, they engaged with the audience and shared that "This is the coolest high school auditorium we've ever played." The band also shared that they feel a strong connection to Vermont because of the similarities with their home state, Vera Cruz in Mexico.
After they finished performing, they opened it up to questions. Ruth Stallard, eighth grader, asked what their favorite thing about Vermont is and one of the brothers responded, "the people." Mimi Konda-Olmstead, ninth grader, asked where they get their inspiration from and one of the brothers said, "Travel. You should do it. You get fresh ideas and your imagination is reawakened." A number of Senora Bristow's fifth grade Hartford elementary Spanish students had the opportunity to ask the band questions and one student asked about their favorite musical collaborations. One of the brothers shared that he did a recent collaboration with Bruce Springsteen on a song called "Stones." One of the other brothers said the Chieftains and a third brother said his favorite collaboration was with "elder musicians from Mexico."
Their joy of performing and educating was evident throughout the concert. Hannah Gubbins, junior, described their music as “upbeat” and appreciated that “they taught us about what they were singing about.” After the concert concluded there were more classroom visits to Mr. Trudeau's high school band class and another cartooning workshop with students in Mrs. Hagge's high school English class.
Thanks so much to BarnArts, Pentangle and the Vermont Humanities Council for making this concert and programming possible. Thank you to the Villalobos Brothers and Marek Bennett for visiting our school. Thank you to everyone at WUHSMS who helped with this event. And, thank you to all of the teachers who incorporated The Most Costly Journey into their classes and to all of the students who read the book and participated in the Vermont Reads program.
C.R.A.F.T. wraps up first official year
The first official year for the CRAFT program is wrapping up! Current and rising CRAFT students gathered at Springbrook Farm in Reading to tour the cheese making operation and dairy barns. We also reflected on the first year of classes and experiences and set some good structures and excitement in place for the 23-24 school year. For a closing reflection, students completed this phrase: "CRAFT IS" with: hands-on, community, helps you get outside, fun, an adventure, a lot of trees, community building, creative, gardening, fun, cool, awesome, amazing, great, exciting, building resilient systems, not boring, creativity, our future, growing and eating a lot of good food, learning, an experience, outdoorsy, interesting, and crucial for our future. Couldn't say it better!