From Brittany Woods to the World!

Saint Augustine wrote that "the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page."  If this is so, then one group of 8th graders from Brittany Woods Middle School are well into their first chapter. Under the direction of French teacher Alexis McGeahy and Latin teacher Madelyn Roth, thirteen students along with parent chaperones had the opportunity to dive deep into the history, culture, food, and beauty of Europe on a once-in-a-lifetime spring break trip.

After fundraising for over a year, the group spent ten busy days exploring London, Paris, Rome and surrounding areas. Highlights included Colosseum, the Pantheon, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Vatican City, the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, and Westminster Abbey.  One traveler called it, "the most fabulous time of our lives."

Plans are already underway for next year's trip, which will include Paris, Lucerne, Munich and Heidelberg, with stops at Neuschwanstein Castle and Dachau concentration camp. They are still accepting students, and travel arrangements will be through EF Educational Tours.

Thanks to Sarah Holahan and Joycelyn Barnes for the photos.

Jackson Park Elementary 'I Have a Dream'

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we share this beautiful video from 2007, featuring third graders from Jackson Park Elementary School. 

UCHS Jazz Band Workshops with Peter Martin

The University City High School Jazz Band recently spent an afternoon with famed jazz pianist Peter Martin.  The band was invited, as they have been for the past ten years, to participate in a workshop at the Sheldon Concert Hall  in Grand Center.

Students had the outstanding opportunity to perform for Martin (himself a UCHS alum, class of 1987), who then gave them detailed feedback on their performance.  Students were free to ask questions, and topics covered included everything from how to achieve a more authentic New Orleans jazz sound to the complexities of syncopation to what makes the blues sound like the blues.

The workshop concluded with Martin accompanying the band on the piano, enabling these lucky students to claim that not only have they performed in one of the premiere concert halls in the nation, but also that they have played with one of the most acclaimed jazz pianists of our time.

Jazz Band Director Stan Coleman (a Yale University Distinguished Educator) consistently seeks out educational and performance opportunities for his students.  Over the years they have had the opportunity to work and play with many locally and nationally known musicians. In 2012 the jazz band won ten awards at the UMKC Jazz Festival, and they look forward to future festivals and competitions.

University City High School has a proud tradition of producing outstanding musicians, including the likes of Peter Martin, Jeremy Davenport, Marty Ehrlich, Ronnie Burrage, Wayne du Maine, David Harris, and most recently 2013 grad Zach Morrow, who just last week performed at the Monterrey Next Generation Jazz Festival. 

You can catch the current crop of UCHS jazz legends, along with some returning alumni, when they perform at the Starlight Concert Series this summer at Heman Park!

Band Director Stan Coleman
with Peter Martin

Photos by Kim Deitzler.

From the University City Musician Documentary Project

The University City Musician Documentary Project recently posted this blog on the University City Patch. We love what it has to say about the district's rich heritage in music and arts education and how they prepare our students for future careers both in and out of the music and arts fields.

U. City Native Tom Seltzer Brings Jazz Icons To Life In New York City

Music and the music programs of the University City School District have affected students and influenced their entire lives even if they didn't go on to be professional musicians.

While researching and interviewing for this music documentary project, we have found that music and arts education as part of the general education in the University City Public Schools has been at the core of what the district has wanted to instill in all students and it's literally written in stone on the front of University City Senior High School. Whether or not students go on to be professional musicians or not has not been the goal. Rounding out pupils and giving them a broad base of knowledge and artistic sensibilities to take on to their careers for the rest of their lives seems to have been the aim.

U. City native and UCHS alumni of the class of 1988 Tom Seltzer is an illustrator, graphic designer, and marketing expert in New York City and has been there since he graduated from Columbia University. Even though he managed to make a living working for some of the largest financial firms in the world doing information graphics and artwork for years, he never really forgot or lost the influence that participation as a saxophonist in the bands at Brittany Woods and U. City High gave him.

Tom more than freely admits that he was never destined to be a professional musician of any sort because of that involvement, let alone go on to be one of the truly great jazz musicians that were in U. City during his era like Todd Williams, Jeremy Davenport,Peter Martin, or Christopher Thomas. But that acknowledgement does not mean that music had not permanently influenced his work and artistic expression.

Thursday, May 30th in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, New York, Tom is debuting his original print series "Jazz" at "Dizzy's On Fifth", a restaurant and music venue. Stepping away slightly from his "day job" of running his own design studio and producing work for others, Tom has chosen to portray his interpretation of 11 of the greatest jazz icons ever in his own style for himself and for others to appreciate (or even buy). Fresh looks at Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins are what Tom has put up for the world to see and even get at home on his website. He has even invited his sister Eve Seltzer, another U. City native and UCHS graduate to come and perform with The 11th Street Trio for the evening's entertainment.

And beyond the debut of Tom's own artwork with storied musicians, he has already teamed up with musicians of today to help them interpret their artistic visions. Internationally known jazz musicians like Nicholas Payton and David Gilmore as well as noted Broadway musical theater composer and U. City native Jeremy Schonfeld have called on Tom and his skills. And even more noteworthy because of the nature of this blog, we want to let you know that Tom is the designer of the logo for The University City Musician Documentary Project also, at the request of the director of the project Rod Milam.

Tom is one of many people we have found so far who have passed through the music programs of the University City School District, not gone on to become a musician or music professional, but have used the influence of the music classes they had later on in their lives and careers. This pattern seems to show that what many of the music educators we've interviewed so far were trying to do was successful. Their main goal of not producing professional musicians, but producing people literate in the world of music to the point where applying some of what they learned in class to their lives, lives on. And it seems to live on so well in some former students that expressing that musical influence today is as natural to them as using parts of any of the other disciplines they were taught in school. This and some other factors seem to be what makes up the soul of many of the U. Citians far and wide that we've encountered so far.

The original posting of this article can be found here

Holocaust Survivor Speaks to U. City Students

April 8 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. That seems to be lost on some in other parts of the country. A mom in Michigan thinks “The Diary of Anne Frank” is too “pornographic” for middle school reading. While in Albany, New York a teacher is being disciplined for assigning a Nazi propaganda essay on why Jews were evil.

Reading stories like these in the news make me glad to live in U. City where diversity and knowledge are celebrated. 

Instead of controversy, our students heard a remarkable, first-hand account of the holocaust from Sara Moses, one of the youngest children to survive a Jewish ghetto in Poland and two Nazi concentration camps.  Ms. Moses barely survived the concentration camp and was eventually reunited with her father and they immigrated to St. Louis.

On April 12, Ms. Moses shared her story with classes at the middle and high schools.

Sara Moses visited with Brittany Woods Middle School students
and shared about her childhood experiences in a World War II
concentration camp.

My seventh grader was privileged to hear Ms. Moses speak. In his words, it was “life-changing” to hear her story. Until meeting Ms. Moses he had only read about the holocaust in books. Hearing her speak brought history to life and have him greater empathy for those that suffered like Ms. Moses. He also said it gave him a better understanding of the cruelty that took place and emphasized the importance of being kind to people.

 

Holocaust survivor Sara Moses spoke with University City High
School students in Eleanor Aboussie and Michael Daly's classes.

 

How fortunate our students are to have such rich experiences as part of their academic studies.

 

Below is a story from the Idaho Mountain Express which tells some of Sara Moses' story.

 

Holocaust survivor tells her story
Imagination and extra food from a Nazi guard kept Sara Moses alive

---

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

By TERRY SMITH
Express Staff Writer

Sara Moses says she survived Nazi concentration camps by using her vivid imagination and because of the generosity of a female Nazi guard.

Now 73, Moses was a 6-year-old Jewish girl when she was separated from her family and taken from her home in Poland in 1944.

"Out of necessity, I developed a rich, strong, imaginary world that helped me to survive the horrors that were to come," Moses said Friday at the Community School in Sun Valley. "I used what I had. I had my hands. I imagined that the fingers on my hand had faces. I gave each one of them names. My fingers became my family."

Moses is one of few children who survived the horrors of the concentration camps.

Moses now speaks throughout the United States about the Holocaust. She said she is willing to revisit the horrors of her childhood because "evil-doers grow bigger and stronger when they are surrounded by people who say nothing."

"The reason I speak, why I go back to those times is so that lessons of the Holocaust, not just the Holocaust, but the lessons of the most horrible genocide in history will not be repeated," she said. "If we don't learn from the past, it will be repeated."

Moses was only a 1-year-old child when Germany invaded and conquered Poland in 1939. She and her family were forced into the Jewish ghetto in her hometown of Piotrkow. Her mother was taken and killed in a gas chamber when Moses was 5. At the age of 6, she and the rest of her family were rounded up by the Germans. She was separated from her father and other male members of her family and taken first to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Furstenberg, Germany, and later to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Saxony.

She was found barely alive when British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

An estimated 3,600 women worked as guards in German concentration camps throughout the Third Reich. About 60 of them stood trial for war crimes after the war and 21 were found guilty and executed.

The fate of the Nazi guard who helped Moses is unknown, but Moses said she would not likely have survived without the extra food the woman gave her.

Moses said she met the guard at Ravensbruck. She said the guard "looked her up and down" and finally told her that she looked remarkably like her own daughter. Disease at Ravensbruck was killing most of the children.

"She was bringing me her food when she could," Moses said. "Looking back, I believe that this little food she gave me, gave me the chance to survive, a chance that the other children didn't get. The very first to die were the youngest children."

Moses told stories about witnessing "brutal violence against my people" and about her earliest memories of "living in fear."

"I remember walking in a line of people, carrying a little bundle with Nazi guards watching us on either side with guns."

She described a train ride in a cattle car: "It seems like we were on the floor of that train for days, without food and water. Many people died."

At Bergen-Belsen, Moses said, she remembers "seeing a skeletal person living on the floor across from me chewing on a dry bone—I was envious, I wanted that bone."

Thousands died at Bergen-Belsen, either in the gas chambers or from diseases that ravaged the concentration camp.

"We had to lie on the floor among the dead and dying bodies," she said. "This was the lowest point of my life."

Hip Hop Speaks to Kids

Who says that  appropriate “rap” music and “hip-hop” dance moves can’t be used as stimuli for creative writing, word imagery and creative expression?

Using this music is a connection and opens doors of communication for learners. The students in Mrs. Wells 4^th grade class at Pershing School have been actively engaged in bringing words to life through writing, art expression, dance and music. These experiences will lead to the creation of a performance piece created by the students that weaves music, dance and their original expressions of rhythmical raps.

Visiting performing artist teacher, U. Citian Diane Davenport, is assisting in working with the students, Mrs. Wells and Mrs. Hume, the Literacy Coach in this collaboration. The students have met two University City Alums, Orlando Watson and Dedrick Mullen who are producers of rap artists. Fidel Muhammad, a University City High School Freshman shared his writing with the students.

Redd Williams, hip-hop choreographer and teacher at COCA is working with the kids on hip-hop moves to use in their performance. He has choreographed for Beyonce, Nelly, Lady Gaga, and many others.

Let’s re-visit the question. Can appropriate “rap” music and “hip-hop” dance moves be used as stimuli and tools in communication arts? observe these Grade Level Expectation:Reading 2B: Identify and/or explain examples of sensory details, sound devices, and figurative language in text along with basic literary techniques.  The answer to the question is “yes.”

The Hip-Hop Speaks to Kids Event will be held at Pershing School on MAY 16^th at 6:00 p.m. in the gym.

Submitted by Diane Davenport
Photos provided by the Communications and Media Services of the School District of University City

UCHS Robolions Competition Photos

The UCHS FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 3397, The Robolions, had a great time at this year's St. Louis Regional Championship.  Although they didn't advance to the World Championship this year, their robot looked great and performed well.  Here are a few photos from the competition. Read more about team 3397 here and here.

This year's robot, "Serenity", ready to compete.

Inspecting the robotic arm.

Christine and Mike remove the robot's mechanical arm to replace a bolt sheared off in competition.

Andrew blogs live from the pit.

Marquise reattaches the arm, post repair.

Grace, Henry, and Paul talk strategy.

Serenity performs during a match.

Carl and Walter drive during a match.

Placing Serenity on the field.

Go Lions!

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