Odessa High School students will soon be immersed in The Living History Museum Time Warp!, courtesy of a $5,965 grant from the Education Foundation.
The walk through history is a collaboration between the history, art and theater departments. Working on the project are U.S. history teacher Milissa McCarty, Head Theatre Director Chyree LeMaster, art instructor Malcolm Ervin and technical theatre director Ray Newton.
“We’re doing a cross-curricular engagement on the content that is STAAR tested for 11th grade U.S. history,” McCarty said.
It’s the only history tested grade level statewide.
“This is their last test for the state in their high school career. We’ve done it on a very small scale in the past, where we would take them during a class period and have theater kids do a monologue of a president or something like that.”
“Now what we’re doing is reenacting certain parts of history that are heavily tested. We’re doing costumes and props and all of that stuff. We’ve gotten the school to be able to give us three class periods in the morning and three class periods in the afternoon. So we’re splitting our 714 students … between the morning and the afternoon,” McCarty said.
They will start with the Gilded Age and move through each era of time as it was then with the major issues being acted out.
“For World War I, we’re going to draft them into service to get them through that section, or some of them, at least. So they would be in costume and participating,” McCarty said.
Newton said the students will be brought to Ellis Island where they will be given fake passports.
“We’ll have some of our students steal their passports, or come in costume as an official, and try and to take it from them,” Newton said.
The passport will “time warp” them to the era where they will start, McCarty said.
“That way, we aren’t pushing the 714 kids through together. We can divide them up between the different stations, and they can have a smaller group to be able to work through that station,” she added.
History has obtained special permission to pull their students for that day and divide them up by last name and class periods.
“They’ll all have a passport that they’re going to be responsible for and take back to their classroom, and it will have the information that they have gleaned from going through all of the different stations,” LeMaster said.
It will be like looking at a well-traveled passport and include what they’ve gathered from each place.
“That’s a way for us to check and make sure that they, number one, did the activities, and number two understood what was important in each one,” McCarty said.
LeMaster said it is a fun way of taking Cornell notes. Cornell notes, used in AVID, are a way of taking, organizing and summarizing notes, according to the Learning Strategies website at Cornell University.
“We’ll have little things that they have to do in each section. It’s a fun way of taking notes and knowing that they did it,” LeMaster said.
McCarty said they are planning to have two events — one Nov. 19 and they will cover second semester leading up to the state end-of-course exam.
LeMaster said theater will prepare by making props, ordering items and acting.
“We’ll be using a good portion of the semester to do those things and sort things out, but the history students are learning all the information, and then they’re going to come here and apply it and hopefully become an active part of it and help them to remember it better,” LeMaster said.
McCarty said there are history teachers helping with information for monologues so the information will be accurate and the students will learn about what’s going to be tested.
“Every single teacher in the history department has been helping with this and helping formulate all the information and (helping) get it to the art department and the theater department so we can take it from there and start creating things,” LeMaster said.
She added that the history and theatre departments have been having professional learning communities (PLCs) together to start the process.
“It’s exciting. We’ve got lots of things already planned out. We still have things that we’re still … figuring out and getting set,” but they have started the ball rolling, LeMaster said.
McCarty said they have their staging done as far as what each era is going to depict from that era — what they’re going to focus on.
“For the Progressive Era, we’re going to do the book ‘The Jungle’ from Upton Sinclair, and they’re going to actually go through it as Upton Sinclair, and have to take the notes to be able to write the book ‘The Jungle’ through the meatpacking industry,” McCarty said.
LeMaster said the black box theatre will become the meatpacking plant “with all the nastiness” that goes with it.
McCarty said they will have trench warfare for World War I and Hoovervilles for the Great Depression, for example.
It becomes a production of sorts, LeMaster said.
“A lot of what we do in the theater department are projects with other groups. We do two really big shows during the year, but then we also do these little projects. Each year it’s a little bit different. Last year, it was Rock the Renaissance. Then we did this in a smaller version last year,” LeMaster said.
All the teachers expressed thanks to the Education Foundation because they would not have been able to do this without their help.
In years past, McCarty said they have put on small-scale productions one class period at a time right before EOCs.
With the kids’ encouragement, the teachers decided it would be fun to make it a larger project.
“We decided that if we separated it between the two semesters, that we could get more engagement and it wouldn’t be so rushed,” McCarty said.
She added that they have done Ellis Island on just the history level.
“We’ve done if you get stopped at the nursing office, the nurses’ station with an illness, or bad eyesight, you get deported and you have to go to one room. If you get this you get to go to this place. If you make it all the way through, then you’re in New York,” McCarty said.
“We took that concept and applied it with a time warp idea, like Back to the Future kind of time warp, to where we could separate them into one will be in this era, one group will be in this era, and we will rotate from there.”
At the beginning, they’re going to have to come through Ellis Island, which will be in the Performing Arts Center.
“They will have to come through and wait in line to get their passport that will give them the list of their itinerary, so they know which station to go to next,” McCarty said.
“How we’re going to do it is, if they get knocked out for literacy testing, then they’ll start at that station. If they do not get knocked out for health medical reasons, they’ll start at a different station.”
McCarty said they started this process in April.
“Ms. LeMaster and I have met over the summer. We’ve texted and called back and forth on weekends. We’re still still working on it,” she added.
LeMaster said they are excited to have the art department joining this effort.
Ervin is the logistics and tactical person for the venture.
“I was in art in high school, and we did not have anything that was cross-curricular at that time,” Ervin added.
