The Atlanta School’s Junior High, High School, and alumni all were represented at the Atlanta Opera’s April 27, 2010, performance of The Magic Flute.  The performance was enjoyed enjoyed by all – really!  The Center for Puppetry Arts provided the dragon , Papageno’s birds, and other various and sundry animals; Masonic symbolism pervaded the hall, and the tongue-in-cheek approach to Mozart’s final and usually somber opera resonated with our sophisticated and cultured TAS audience!

The Atlanta School 9th Grade arrived in D.C. on Friday to a chili dinner provided by our most hospitable and gracious hosts – Bernie and Bill Schaeffler.  We are staying in their 9th-floor condo overlooking the Potomac, the Washington Monument, the Capital – need I go on:  it is an awesome vista!  We’ve only been here for two full days, but they’ve already been packed with activity.  On Saturday we walked the Mall from the Jefferson Memorial at the Tidal Basin to the Lincoln Memorial all the way to the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian, where they were having a huge Earth Day festival.

Yesterday (Sunday), we drove to Gettysburg and saw the stage for the battle that was the beginning of the end of the Civil War.  We were able to pull from our experience in U.S. History and the Ken Burns Civil War documentary as well our U.S. Literature reading of The Killer Angels.  Today it’s off the Museum of Natural History, armed with Bekah Ward’s scavenger hunt, then to the Holocaust Museum, and then for dinner on the Chesapeake Bay at the home of one of my childhood friends, the son of our current hosts, to watch the sunset and reflect on the day.

The 7/8 Science class spent two afternoons at Zoo Atlanta observing the various primate species and talking about different ways of expressing emotion.  Laura Mayo, who has been an orangutan keeper at the zoo for over 20 years (now Assistant Curator of Primates), talked to us about orangutan emotions, and I talked about the gorillas that I used to take care of at the zoo.  Our field trips were followed up by a classroom discussion about the difficulty in talking about emotion in other species or even in other people and the different views that scientists have taken regarding this issue.  As we progress through primate and human evolution, this sort of comparative approach will take up more of our class time.

Junior asks for attention