The seventh graders this year have taken part in a multi-part field trip experience called Crossing Delmar with kids from Ritenour Middle School to see how our lives are different. The Delmar Divide refers to a major road in St. Louis City and County separating areas where there are contrasting levels of wealth and differing racial mixes. Areas south of Delmar Boulevard have a 73% white population while the northern part is 93% black. Ritenour is a racially mixed public school district in North St. Louis County. Residents of the area are roughly a third white, a third black and third Hispanic.
The Crossing Delmar experience was split into five different events.
The first event was mainly an exercise to get to know the other kids in the group. A group was typically three Priory kids and two Ritenour kids. We made Rube Goldberg machines. A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption that completes a task using a long chain of reactions. We had an amount of fake money to spend on materials for different parts to make our machine. It was rated on different factors like aesthetics and using certain parts.
On the second event, the kids from Ritenour didn’t come here nor did we go there. Instead, during sports period, we had a person speak to us about the Delmar Divide and problems that black people or women in general faced years ago when trying to buy houses. We then played a board game where some people are bankers, and some people were customers with different traits like race or gender.
On the third event, we went to Ritenour Middle School. We watched a video, Rudy Francisco’s “My Honest Poem.” It was a piece of slam poetry about his life. The organizers then had us write them using a template based on his poem. We then read our poems to each other. We also talked about the different poetic devices used in the poem such as similes, metaphors, and alliteration.
During the fourth activity, we all listened to different songs and we shared what we saw and heard when we listened to a song. For example, one of the songs was “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong. When people shared, they said they saw rainbows, sunshine, and plants. We heard violins, a bass, drums, flute and other instruments. After listening to about five songs, we came up with our ideal places. We talked about what we felt, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw in our ideal place. These places could be fictional like a completely new planet, or an actual place like Florida. Then, every person in a group would pick a line from their ideal place and share it with everyone.
Finally, in the fifth event, we performed a collaborative, group poem using the line that everyone had picked from the fourth event. We had to write the line we had chosen on a notecard as well as draw a picture of what we felt, saw, smelled, tasted, or heard in that line. Then, everyone in their group took their notecard and everyone glued their notecard on a large piece of paper to make a sort of collage of poem lines and pictures. Next, one by one, every group performed their group poem by reading it on a stage. This was to give us a better understanding of the idea of “slam poetry,” the way that Rudy Francisco performed his poem. Finally, after everyone had performed their collaborative poem, we all celebrated with pizza!
