LEF Fellows Learn Lessons to Teach – September 2003
By Kate Antognini / Special to the Minuteman
As part of the Lexington Education Foundation’s new Summer Fellowship program, two LHS teachers, Ann Northup and Brian O’Connell, traveled overseas this summer to become students again for a few weeks.

Northup, who teaches art at the high school as well as Diamond Middle School, took advantage of her $2,955 grant and immersed herself in the culture and art of Mexico for two weeks, while choral director O’Connell used his grant of $1,920 to sing Renaissance music with a world-famous Italian choir.

Northup’s journey started in San Miguel de Allende, where she took a weeklong watercolor workshop with artist Edina Sargert. The class forced her to try her hand at “wet-on-wet” watercolor, a technique in which the artist lets the paint bleed across wet paper.

“The whole thrust was on loosening up and not being detailed and precise, letting the movement dictate the painting,” she said. “It takes more than a week to feel like I’ve reached my comfort zone with a technique, but it was really fun to push in that direction.”

The highlight of Northup’s trip was visiting the villages surrounding Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Oaxaca is home to the indigenous Zapotec people, who specialize in pottery, rug weaving and woodcarving, among other crafts. According to Northup, their villages are like small factories, each producing a single, special commodity. In Arrazola, the native craft is wood-carved, fanciful animals.

“The whole family will do different parts of the job,” Northup said. “The father may be a migrant worker who sends money back home, while the son carves and the daughter paints.” When Northup arrived in the village, two little boys offered to escort her around for a small price.

As she followed them through the village, Northup was struck by the poverty surrounding her.

“The homes are shacks with tin roofs,” she remarked. “You don’t think of people that are employed as being poor. But they’re living off things which cost very little.”

In the end, Northup said she felt incredibly inspired by her fellowship, both as a teacher and an artist.

“My fellowship was such a wonderful gift. The experience of being immersed in another culture cannot be described. I have started painting from my photographs and I’ll see where it will take me.”

She plans to incorporate some of what she learned about Mexican sculpture into her Foundations of Art class next year.

O’Connell’s fellowship took him to Rimini Italy, where he sang Renaissance music with the Tallis Scholars, an internationally renowned vocal ensemble.

“I felt there were gaps in my understanding of Renaissance music, so this for me was absolutely wonderful,” he said. “I was impressed not only with the breadth of experience of the leaders, but the participants were also wonderful people.”

O’Connell was especially struck by the warmth of the Italian people. “I felt more than welcome,” he said. He added that his vocal chords got a good workout. “We sang seven hours a day. To sing that much was wonderful.”

The experience also familiarized him with some less standard singing techniques, such as polyphonic repertoire.

“In [this style] the parts are very different from one another, maybe in different keys,” he explained, while in typical chorus style, “most of the time, parts move at the same time; people use the same rhythm and chords.”

O’Connell is excited about bringing polyphonics and other techniques he picked up from the Tallis Scholars into his work the three student choruses this year. All in all, he describes the fellowship as a peak experience.

“I was like a little kid in a candy shop,” he said.

Northup and O’Connell were the first two recipients of the LEF Summer Fellowship grants. According to the Web site, “The new LEF Summer Fellowship Program provides mini-grants up to $3,000 for Lexington Public School teachers with professional status to attend courses, seminars, or workshops; engage in research, curriculum planning, or independent study - essentially, to pursue activities that promise to enhance their professional life and increase their experience and knowledge.”