Writings, Wanderings

I am a teacher in Ohio who is now one of many teachers facing several weeks of teaching online instead of being in my classroom. I'll be honest, Friday was the most surreal day of my 16-year career. I feel off-kilter but have started working on developing ways to help my students continue developing their Spanish skills. One resource that I've seen appearing on social media several times is this entry from Travel and Leisure about museums with virtual tours . My Cultures class has visited the main art museum in Havana, Cuba, but I am looking forward to giving my students the opportunity to explore other famous sites. I have visited some of the twelve featured museums from this list in real-life too :) British Museum (London) National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) Musee d'Orsay (Paris) I walked past the Uffizi Gallery but that is a museum visit for a return trip to Florence So which one of the museums from the article do you plan on virtually visiting in the ...

First off, let me say that Malaga, Spain is an awesome city that deserved far more than the not-even-really-24-hours that I gave it. If you are traveling through southern Spain and have the room in your itinerary, go there! This Mediterranean city is the birthplace of the famous artist Pablo Picasso and pays tribute to him with more than one museum. His birthplace is closed on Mondays, my day in the city, but the Museo Picasso with over 200 of his pieces on display was open. The museum follows the artist's development from his childhood years and sketches into adulthood with both paintings and sculptures. While a chronological order is the main pattern, some displays focus on a topic such as his art that involved animals. The museum is not huge but does involve walking and there aren't always places to take a rest especially if it is busy like the day I visited. I was pleased with the audioguide although at times it was a lot of information and I was ready to move on befo...

June 2017 one of my friends from high school and I did a whirlwind trip from Ohio down to the Gulf Coast and back in one week. Our route included stops in Nashville, Montgomery, New Orleans, Jackson, Mobile, and Birmingham alongside several small towns. We ate good food, shared lots of thoughts and laughs, and learned. We had been taught the basics of the civil rights movement over our years as students, but seeing places firsthand gave those lessons true meaning. One important museum in this growth was the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. This Alabama museum is located across the street from the Sixteenth St Baptist Church, the site of a horrific bombing in the 1960's that killed four young girls at church. The museum's exhibits are focused in four main galleries: Movement, Barriers, Confrontation, and Human Rights. While the exhibits had artifacts from the time period, they also worked to recreate some scenes. For example, the crucial role played by the churches in Afri...

Last weekend I made a flying trip to South Carolina for a wedding reception. (And when I say flying, I don't mean that I flew but that it was a fast one, just over 48 hours gone from home, at least 18 of those spent in my car.) I arrived about two hours early for the reception, so not wanting to sit sweltering in my car, I drove a few miles over to the town of Fountain Inn and after cruising a few streets, found some public parking. My wandering led me to the Chamber of Commerce which houses a small hometown museum open for a couple of hours on a few days of the week--a few hours that happened to coincide with my visit. The museum is basically one large room that has a series of displays, each one flowing into the next. A little bit of attention is given to the earliest native inhabitants--including a display of a small collection of arrowheads--before moving into the beginning of European colonization. The right-hand side of the room moves visitors through time with a ment...

Living in northeast Ohio, I am blessed to be not far from the Mill Creek Metropark System. This large park--composed of multiple units--is home to Fellows Riverside Garden. Here, in its main building the Davis Center, a gallery holds rotating art displays. The current display is called " As Did Monet, Artists Paint the Landscape! " A few dozen paintings all created in the outdoor fresh air show off the landscape of the park and other regional green spaces.   I love the connection to the older technique of creating art out in nature. I enjoyed looking at the pieces created by local artists. The paintings very much focus on the trees, bushes, and flowers of the landscapes. Animals and man-made structures make fewer appearances. Only one painting in the entire room focused solely on a building (a stairwell actually). While most of the art focuses on spring or summer, several include the colors of fall and even winter makes an appearance. The works cover a variet...

What do you think of when you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci? The enduring mysterious smile of his Mona Lisa? His far-before-their-time flying designs? His use of mirror writing to code his notes? His designation as a Renaissance man--one with skills across many subject areas--lays the cornerstone of a traveling exhibit currently on display at the Carnegie Science Museum in Pittsburgh. Thanks to the preservation of his codices (housed throughout Europe), over 60 of his inventions have been built either full-size or in model form for visitors to peruse and for some, touch with their own hands. The exhibit takes guests through his works by themes and so after a very brief introduction to his life, starts with a look at his inventions related to weather and flying. Here, I learned that while da Vinci was most definitely an inventor, he was a man who looked at what was already in existence and worked to improve upon it especially in a way that would decrease the amount of effort n...