in high school that I considered the
importance of interdisciplinary learning
starting from young age art has always
been a priority so I pursued it right
after middle school I applied to the
screened art program here at Murrow
got in and began my high school career
as an artist basically courses offered I
thought that I was going to be a curator
a graphic designer or a starving artist
and although I respect the craft
somewhere along the line I felt that I
was capable of producing more than art
eventually I joined the MSTAR program
which provided the platform to
experiment in science research and in
this program we did technical writing to
prepare us to write a 15 page research
paper on an experiment of our choice and
I found that the skills I’ll use in this
class would actually aid me in other
classes for instance we developed the
ability to find credible information on
a subject and critically analyze it in a
way that connects to the question at
hand yet in my art class we needed to
use the same skills and one assignment
required us to pick a line in a poem and
create a piece of artwork and so my
teacher handed us a poem called The
Waste Land by TS Eliot and sent us off
to do whatever we saw fit but before I
could produce a piece with any depth I
had to do some research on the subject
in order to fully interpret the work of
literature and one of the lines in the
first stanza specifically caught my
attention it said April is the cruelest
month and with the help of classmate we
deducted that Elliott was referencing a
time of war which resulted in a massive
dead bodies covered by the snow and
inevitably the warm weather in April
would melt the snow and reveal the
remnants of war and so the meaning of
this line inspired me to create an
entire series of oil paintings and so
and despite what I was learning from
both courses doing both was hard really
hard I found that in my junior
particularly I was spreading myself too
thin starting at 8:00 a.m. I would go
straight to ap biology for two periods
then immediately following I had AP
English and right after that I had
advanced mixed media course and from
there with no lunch break or free period
I would run from the fourth floor to the
first just to grab lunch only to go
straight to my advanced oil painting
class followed by honors US history and
after the school day I would muster up
the energy to go straight to an art
related after program at a place like
the Whitney or the new Museum and I
found that I was more focused on
completing the work assigned from each
class that I couldn’t actually absorb
all of the information out of a six hour
school day I was spending two hours on
art and another two on biology and I was
I was trying to complete the work rather
than actually hone each skill however I
shouldn’t have to overwhelm myself just
to pursue two areas of study that
actually go along with each other and if
we combine both art and science into one
course then it would allow for students
like me to pursue two areas of study
while in the timespan of one course the
type of course I’m talking about could
use art to understand science or science
understand art for instance in my
biology class if we did a close study of
molecular structures using oil paint or
charcoal that I may have better
understood that unit or in my art class
we could have did a close study of the
anatomy from a scientific point of view
and then realizing that my courses could
be more dynamic I began to understand
that incorporating interdisciplinary
perspectives in the classroom setting is
a crucial component of learning and
unfortunately classes at Moreau
typically feature one area of study
which is limiting in that it breaks
connections between two areas that
actually complement each other
and in retrospect the things I did in my
science in art class actually went along
with each other but I would have never
made those connections had I stuck to
one area studied the way
child’s encouraged to this is why we
should restructure our courses to
incorporate interdisciplinary
perspectives and in that we can improve
upon the way in which we learn and
appeal to students like me who have
[Applause] [Music]