"Ahhh, the smell of AP exam booklets in the morning....."

 

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    It's that time again. This week, the first week of June, a thousand or so Advanced Placement high school teachers and college history professors will be in downtown Tampa, Florida at the Tampa Convention Center, spending a week reading AP US History exam essays and short answer responses and awarding scores that may translate into college credits for the over 500,000 high school students around the world that take the AP US History exam each year in early May. Tampa is one of several sites that host AP readers of various subjects; other sites include Kansas City, Cincinatti, and Louisville.

(Tampa Convention Center, where the deed is done.)

    History teachers and professors from all over the US will start arriving in Tampa on May 31, and they will find their hotel rooms, meet up with new roommates or old friends, and find their reading assignment. Over the next week, they will report to their assigned reading room and their assigned table. More introductions as readers meet their table leader and tablemates; usually there are 8 table members. Each table is assigned a specific prompt to score. The table leader begins going through some training exercises, calibrating, it's called. The readers read some sample responses along with scoring commentaries provided by a few table leaders and question experts and creators. The point is to get the readers on the same page, so to speak, to build a consistency so that reading scores are less arbitrary, less subjective. The hope is that different readers will be able to score the same responses with close to the same score.

    Scoring happens over the next 7 days, from 9 AM to 5 PM. Readers move at their own pace, and table leaders "backread" often, that is, read essays and scores that tablemates have scored to make sure the scores are consistent. These are long days, with readers reading hundreds of responses a day. To break things up, there are stretch breaks and a lunch break. Some tables create games to play, and there's usually lots and lots of candy available. It is a long day. 

    In the evenings, there are sometimes best practices presentations, vendor tables, and maybe authors doing book talks. People also find others with similar interests or hobbies, so there may be groups of runners, walkers, musicians, etc, meeting up. Others check out restaurants. Still others just chill in their rooms, maybe reading, or, for a misfortunate few, even doing schoolwork (shudders).  

    I was fortunate to be a reader for several years. I had put off applying to be a reader for years, because I couldn't imagine reading hundreds of essays a day. Grading my own classes' essays was an arduous chore that I sometimes put off for too long.  However, I realized that readers were correct when they told me that I should go. It is a hard week, but it came with benefits. It made me a better AP teacher because I saw how the "sausage is made" so to speak, and I enjoyed meeting new people, and gaining different perspectives. I've always said that the best professional learning for teachers is always just getting teachers together to talk and to share.

    So, to my friends and roommate who are returning to Tampa this week: Good luck, have a great time. I'll miss you (but I live only a half-hour away now.....)

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition

     Boy, was I misled. Or did I mislead myself?  A few weeks ago, I saw a notice of a Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Exhibit opening nearby. I could swear I saw the words "immersive experience" somewhere. I snapped up the tickets, enthralled by the two Van Gogh immersive experiences that we had recently seen. Maybe I just saw the words "immersive experience" in my own head.  In any case, we were in for a slight disappointment when we arrived.

    There were no projectors, no moving images, no musical scores. There was just a brief - but well done video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NadMZ-P93Ms ) from an interesting art education YouTube series and then blown-up reproduction canvases of many of the panels. 

    The pictures had nice explanations attached, and there was a good audio guide that paired with the exhibition well. The pictures were large and beautiful and powerful. The viewer had access to the works that he or she would never get anywhere else. I've been fortunate enough to have seen the Sistine Chapel in person; that experience was awesome and almost overwhelming, but it was also very crowded and had the guards loudly shushing the tourists when their whispers grew too loud. This was a good compromise. Although I believe it would be relatively easy  for skilled creative people to create a mindblowing immersive projected experience, this exhibit is worth seeing, whether or not you've seen the real thing.

Beyond Van Gogh

       We now live in the age of immersive exhibits.  Creative and business-minded people work together to create experiences by using projectors and music to bring artistic, architectural, or historical objects to life.  They either rent a big building, partner with a museum for gallery space, or put up a tent.

    A while ago, we went to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida to see "Van Gogh Alive!", or first immersive experience. ( https://histocrats.blogspot.com/2020/12/van-gogh-alive.html ) It was quite an experience. In fact, we returned a couple of more times. "Van Gogh Alive!" focuses on the last ten years of the artist's life, and the gallery space created rooms that the visitor moved through while viewing the images projected on walls and floors. It was great.

    Because these creators deal with non-copyrighted material, it makes sense that there may be competing immersive shows, and there are. Recently, we went to see "Beyond Van Gogh."  This show attempts to cover the artist's whole life, instead of just a ten-year period, and it's venue is a giant tent. That adds a slight disadvantage because winds move the tent walls that are the projection screens.  Here's a short video:  

    Verdict: "Beyond Van Gogh" is a good show, and it's nice to see the whole career presented, but I think I prefer "Van Gogh Alive!" In my opinion, "Van Gogh Alive!" had better music and better storytelling for it. Also, there is something to be said for it's presentation in 3-4 galleries, instead of one big rectangle like "Beyond Van Gogh."  However, both are worth seeing, and I look forward to more immersive exhibits in the future.