On Monday morning, I thankfully had no dogs chasing me on my run. In painting, we had our final critiques. I had never been so nervous for mine, but it went amazingly well. Everyone responded quite enthusiastically to my painting, agreeing that it was my best painting of the semester. I was very proud of the positive reaction, but even more, I was proud of myself for once. Usually, I am so critical of my own art, but I was really excited about my final painting. Even before the critique happened, I decided to put this painting into the final show, which was quickly approaching. I had to give it a title, so I called it “Verdure Blu” (Blue Vegetable). The rest of the day was devoted to art history studying.
Tuesday was our last day teaching in the elementary school in Cortona. Even from only four days total of teaching, I have really grown attached to my third graders here, as crazy and wild as they can be. They finished up their superhero comics and shared them with each other until the end of class. We had a very dramatic good-bye filled with hugging over and over again, although we still have an art show for them next week, so hopefully they will all come. Being able to interact with these kids has definitely been one of the best parts of Cortona. That afternoon, I continued on my final project in book making, and later on continued with my lovely art history studying.
Wednesday morning, we had our Cortona program group portrait taken by a funny Italian photographer. I was amused by it, because we were all sitting on the steps of Cortona’s main piazza waiting for him to come and prep us for the photo. Well, he did come with his camera, but without any warning and without saying anything, he just started snapping photo after photo of us. We finally started smiling when we realized what was happening, but I am interested to see what the first few photos that he took look like, when no one was aware of what was happening. Immediately after our group portrait, my art ed class and I hopped into a van to go to Sodo, the elementary school down the mountain from Cortona, which we briefly visited the week before. I was extremely nervous about this day of teaching here because I remembered from our visit how wild the class seemed. I was not looking forward to spending several hours with scissors and glue sticks flying through the air (this is what I imagined). The third graders at Sodo definitely proved me wrong. The class of 22 worked amazingly well for almost two and half hours. They had brilliant ideas for the superhero collage project, and were actually well-disciplined throughout the entire day. I was also taken aback at how loving everyone one was. Several students had given us drawings and notes upon our arrival (my favorite is a drawing of me in a purple dress sitting on a hammock between two pink cotton candy-like trees. This student knows me too well). Everyone was really excited about the project, their superheroes were so original. Something that I was amused by was that all the kids were interested in how we spelled our names and what our signatures looked like. The entire class ended up asking us for our autograph. When it was time for lunch, all the third graders fought with who would be able to sit next to us. They literally attached themselves to us, making it extremely difficult to walk to their cafeteria. I was amazed at how lunch worked in this elementary school. It is essentially just like our three-course dinner at Tonino’s in Cortona. There are tables set up with nice ceramic plates, glasses, and silverware (no Styrofoam or paper or plastic). The students are all very independent, pouring their own water from large water containers and cutting their own food. The first course was a plain pasta, second course was a meat and spinach, and for dessert, everyone got fresh pineapple. The whole school ate together, including all the teachers. I found this to be such a nice way to eat lunch as a community. I had a very fun table who bombarded me with questions the entire time. Before we were served our second course, they seemed to be experts of all the foods that I liked, and told the lunch lady for me that I was a vegetarian and would not eat the meat, but would love the spinach. Once again, we had a dramatic good-bye. All the third graders hugged me over and over. This was definitely the most fun teaching experience I had ever had. The rest of the day was not nearly as fun. I went on a run, and then we had our last art history lecture, ending with the enigmatic Mona Lisa. Then at dinner, we found out that there was a ballet performace to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” at the theater in Cortona. We decided to get some culture and go see this, expecting a nice traditional ballet. What we ended up seeing was definitely not your typical ballet. It was the most modern of all dances, with Vivaldi juxtaposed with strange noises and sounds. The dancers performed moves that I previously thought were not humanly possible, constantly defying gravity and rolling around on other people. It was mesmerizing, and at some points rather creepy, to watch. At one point one of the male dancers was dancing with just a projected image of another dancer, and it took me forever to decide whether or not she was real or just a projection of light. Overall, the dance was extremely weird, but awesome.
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