Recently, the sixth grade went on a field trip to see Cartography at the New Victory Theater in Manhattan. Cartography is the science and the making of maps. The show was about four refugees who had to pack all of their belongings into a backpack and move.
This experimental theater is known as “devised documentary theater” which means that the playwrights interviewed real people and created a script about their lives. Later, we were asked, “How would you feel if you would have to flee your homeland all of a sudden?”
That day, attending the performance, students were asked to bring our cell phones. This was odd because teachers never let us bring our cell phones–that’s crazy! Suddenly during the performance, an actor told us all to get out our phones. No, not time for Clash Royale? Nope. We were asked to use our phones to go to map.com and trace our family lineage. Pretty interactive. We learned about maps that represent all sorts of places on the globe uses, and how cartographers make them. Students learned to acknowledge the continents and oceans. Political maps, physical maps, and many others.
The show taught us about both maps and the Refugee Crisis which is currently taking place in Syria. It helped us to understand that this situation is real– it is not just pictures and stories that we read in class–these are real people with serious problems and they need help.
