At the St. Cecilia's College, 22nd March, Tuesday

We started our day with going for a technical visit to St. Cecilia's College in the northern part of Derry.

More than 800 students, only girls go to this catholic school. They can be proud of their new, airy, well-equipped builings. Besides the traditional subjects they are taught Drama, Technology in a really modern and effective way. We could see students working in their Art, Drama, Science, and Cooking lessons. Everybody was working silently in neat, beautiful classrooms, they were organising their work and studies independently. In my opinion they can rather develop their skills than just following their teachers instructions.

In the hall

Drama lesson

Students' projects in Technics

In the school gallery

In the afternoons they can choose from different programmes of Public speaking, Ceramics, Gardening, Choir, Cheerleading, Film club or App building activities and services.

The school expects their students to wear a uniform of bottle green pleated skirt, with a V-necked green jumper with a green white stripe around it. The girls wear white blouses here, a blazer with a school badge, green knee-length socks, plus green and black hair ribbon. High heels are not permitted in the interests of safety.

A student's painting

Computer studies

School Yard - Amphiteatrum

We were guided by Corona MacDaid who answered all of our questions.

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In the afternoon we had a triple lesson about art and had discussions about its definition and purpose, explaining and sharing our opinions with our partner.

Some think that art must have a message, a symbolic meaning or some aesthetic pleasure regardless of time, culture or other circumstances.

In the second block we were given a text (taken from 'TEDTalk) about a North American artist, Janet Echelman who became a sculptor after being a painter.

Learning about TED TALK and BEYOND

https://www.ted.com/talks

https://www.beyondtextbooks.org/

As it was revealed the essence of art for her was something like 'taking imagination seriously'.

She found a unique way to express it: designing and creating amazingly volumetric 'sculptures' in metropolises using fishermen's nets, later steel and water. Meanwhile she was permanently searching for the proper materials and aeronautical engineering techniques for her pieces of art to be durable and resistant to capricious weather conditions, not only to strong wind and salty water but also hurricanes.

In the last part of the section some hints on the traditional Irish music were introduced and ideas about it were shared.