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Project Week does so much more than replace final exams at the end of each semester. Come closer and have a look.
What you're really seeing in Project Week is the undercarriage of progressive education. Many of us are accustomed to the educational attitude that we really need to know the basics before we can embark on new work. That's why we go to lectures, study texts, write papers and take final exams until we're in graduate school and finally begin tackling our own work in the form of a thesis. That philosophy doesn't fly at a progressive school. We'd rather our students use what they've learned at the end of each semester to demonstrate their mastery of the subjects that interest them most.
Take Jyn, for instance, a junior with an interest in molecular biology (and a mean Texas Hold 'Em player, but that's another story). Jyn, with help from his science teacher, Leslie Reed, decided to evaluate several food staples from our kitchen for the presence of genetically modified organisms. Jyn wanted to know if he was eating natural food or something from Dr. Frankenstein's garden. Extracting DNA from food and comparing it to known standards sounds like thrill-a-minute stuff, but Jyn soon found out it's mostly a lot of work. Many hours of reading manuals, pipetting, heating, cooling, centrifuge spinning and just plain waiting yielded solid results: our oat cereal, flour and grape tomatoes have been fiddled with. For more images from the investigation, go here:
Genetically Modified Organism testing
Juniors Kai and Ben wanted to take their bird identification skills to the next level during Project Week. Kai is normally excused from our Long Spring trips in May so that he can compete with a team in the World Series of Birding in Cape May, NJ. Ben is into it on the photography side. Together, they put in field time to map the species on campus, then built a directional microphone to capture the ones who fly over without stopping. The mic sat out all night connected to a laptop PC that captured and sorted the sounds, which were then compared graphically with a national database to identify the fly-bys. For a closer look at the apparatus, go here:
Project Week is not a science fair, however. It is also an intensive time for musicians to hone their skills, create new music and find ways of integrating different forms of music into new and, occasionally hilarious, hybrids such as the hip-hop/bluegrass group produced. Others study dance, make movies, write or perform plays. Remy and Cerise both created full clothing lines from drawings to finished garments. Saturday in the Currier Center's Calder Hall we were treated to the end results of much of this work. Imagine a concert that shifts from a "Micro Fiction" reading to a singer/songwriter to "Deconstructing the Fiddle" (a.k.a. "de-uptightifying" the violin) to "Mathematics and Traditional Dance." Are you starting to get the picture? Here are more galleries to help you:
Currier Center Presentation Gallery 1
Currier Center Presentation Gallery 2
Cerise's Spring Fashion Gallery
You also don't need to be an artist, molecular biologist, or world-class birder to participate in Project Week. Learning how to learn this way takes practice, so teacher-driven group projects are offered in addition to approved individual projects, much to the relief of many freshmen and sophomores. Group project topics this spring included "Mathematics and Traditional Dance," language intensives, a longitudinal study of student health and satisfaction and Anything Goes (the school play), to name just a few.
Those projects that end in papers, recordings, posters, art objects and other non-performance tangibles are put on display in the library on Saturday afternoon. It's impossible to absorb the scope of Project Week in a single day, but we put it all out there regardless. And when it was done we had a luau, courtesy of the KDU and some helpful Tongan relatives. Have a look at these final galleries of library presentations and ask yourself, honestly, if you believe final exams are a better idea than Project Week:
Library Presentation Gallery 1
Library Presentation Gallery 2