Trippin'
Oct 6, 2005 2:51 PM
All eyes are on the Dancing Maenad, a Roman copy of a Greek relief, and all ears are turned to the docent' story during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Adele Unterberger, who has been teaching for 37 years and organizing class trips almost that long, couldn’t say enough about how supportive of teachers and public schools the Met is. She described slide presentations to meet specific teacher requests, professional development programs and “lunch-and-learn programs” held at schools in all the boroughs. And she also spoke of how the toughest kids from her lower East Side school, PS 134, “cannot believe the beauty of the museums’ main lobby or the vast extent of the collections.”
Students visiting the newly renovated Ellis Island Museum can trace the arrival in America of their relatives from among the 22 million immigrants processed through the Island between 1892 and 1954. They can see examples of the bigotry each ethnic group faced and activate giant displays showing facts and figures about each wave of immigrants.
At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, students actually see how their immigrant ancestors lived and talk to staff members in period dress who portray family members and answer questions about life at that time.
Teacher Debbie Ganeles of PS 178 called her tenement trips from Queens with 4th-graders “wonderfully visual and experiential. The children are so hungry to go places, and here they were able to see and understand about sweat shops and whole families doing piece work at home after work.”
Last year, 26,415 school children dropped in on the 1916 apartment of the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family, the 1870 German-Jewish Gumpertz family and the 1930 apartment of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family. Visitors even celebrated an 1897 home birth and paid a shiva call to a family mourning the loss of Abraham, who worked as a garment factory presser and died of tuberculosis in 1918.
In historic Richmond Town on Staten Island, classes can get a real taste of life in old New York from colonial 1690s to the industrial 1890s.
To see how immigrants got here, book a ride on a masted schooner from the South Street Seaport Museum.
At a recent open house for teachers at the American Folk Museum, teachers toured the exhibits in the architecturally fascinating building and learned they can request specific kinds of classroom materials and tours for their classes.
Michele Talarico-Vizthum said it was “enriching” for her PS 171, Queens, students to come into the city to experience the “energy and scope that is so much bigger than anything they live with in their neighborhoods.” On the other hand, she said, “This museum is not intimidating and the children see work they can imagine themselves doing.”
