New+York+at+Night

=NEW YORK AT NIGHT: A NEW 9TH GRADE PROGRAM FOR ‘09-‘10=

Best, Suzanne, Liz and Marvin** Leaders: Suzanne, Marvin, Liz Notetaker: Vanessa Prescott
 * Below are the notes (thanks Vanessa!) from our workshop on Wednesday, April 1st. We want to thank all who attended, for your questions, your suggestions and your follow-up feedback. Please continue to send us your thoughts and recommendations. We are very excited about this program and your input is enormously helpful.

Notes: Work on project started first semester. Key Question: How can we use the city more? We have students who live in NYC who do not take advantage of their surroundings. We wanted to create more sizzle in our curriculum. Other schools go abroad, but why do that when we have NYC at our fingertips? Class time from other areas is lost when we go on trips, What can we do to add a new program and not lose more class time? How about using weekends or Friday nights? There are several opportunities for visiting night events in the city. There is an internal marketing piece: How can we make 9th grade pop so that it feels like 8th graders have arrived? Possible Activities can range from the High brow to the more everyday life experience Visiting Sanitation Dept Knicks game Theater Experience Visit Jackson heights eat Indian food and then see a Bollywood film Lincoln Center Walking tours of different NYC neighborhoods Apollo Theater - History of Afro-American Arts in the City/ Slam poetry AMNH - Planetarium The kickoff to it would be at the beginning of the year having the 9th graders do the Circle Line Trip and take in the skyline. - Author come in.

Students will have a feel of doing ‘grown-up’ things on a Friday night. Has the spirit of hands on information that is real and the kids can connect to. We want to bring a service element into it in the near future. We would like to have input from the faculty to help us plan possible night activities. A huge component of this is to incorporate public transportation. Looking for a final culminating event. One idea is to do an all-night experience, returning to school in the morning. We would like it to build and become an inherent part of the school culture. Introducing/Incorporating Great Books/Authors. We plan to prep kids for each excursion before we go—could use advising time, could use colloquium time, or could simply do it Fri afternoon before we leave for the event. Could we have each kid have a means documenting their experiences (blogs, sketches, journals, etc.)? Engaging kids in neighborhoods in NY that they do not know. Have Big Onion tours with several tour guides: Walking tour of union square / Grammercy park Williamsburg, Flat Iron District etc. Brooklyn Heights w/ walking over the Brooklyn Bridge Other ideas: Moma /Met teen night Observatory in LI Have an astronomer come and have a sky watch etc Grand Central trip- History of the NYC subway- Infrastructure of the city Concern that Jewish students who strictly observe the Sabbath may feel excluded. Could we move to Sat nights? Or could we find a way to work with those students so they are included? Very important not to leave anyone out.